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AIRY  NOTHINGS 

OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 


BY 

GEORGE  GORDON 


flew  l^orft 

STURGIS  &  WALTON 

COMPANY 

1917 

All  rights  reserved 


Copyright,  1917, 
By  STURCIS  &  WALTON  COMPANY. 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.      Published,   October,   1917. 


This  play  in  printed  form  is  designed  for  the 
reading  public  only.  All  dramatic  rights  in  it 
are  fully  protected  by  copyright  in  the  United 
States  and  Great  Britain,  and  no  performance 
— professional  or  amateur — or  public  reading, 
may  be  given  without  the  written  permission  of 
the  publishers  and  the  payment  of  royalty.  Ad- 
dress all  communications  with  reference  thereto, 
to  Sturgis  &  Walton  Company,  31-33  East  27th 
Street,   New   York. 


TO 

MISS  KATHERINE  MACDONALD 

In  memory  of  many  pleasant  evenings  spent 

at  the  theatre,  and  in  especial  of  the 

night  we  witnessed  Mr.  Granville 

Barker's  production  of  "A 

Midsummer  Night's 

Dream" 


An  antique  fable,  and  thereto  a  preface  on 
morals,  such  as  Theseus,  reputed  sometime 
Duke  of  Athens,  vowed  he  never  could  believe. 
And  with  good  reason:  poets,  lovers  and  mad- 
men have  such  seething  brains,  bodying  forth 
the  form  of  things  unknown,  giving  to  airy  noth- 
ing a  local  habitation  and  a  name.  And  yet, 
what's  in  a  name?  The  first  recorded  William 
Shakespeare  was  hanged  for  robbery  in  1248; 
the  latest  Cleopatra  dances  in  burlesque.  Mary 
Fitton  or  Mistress  Davenant  —  what  odds  the 
name?  A  poet  loved  a  woman  and  wooed  her 
frailty  into  immortal  rhyme.  You  are  content 
to  read  his  verses;  then  why  not  I?  Why 
must  I  see  all  Helen's  beauty  in  a  brow  of 
Egypt?  Because  I  know  there  is  a  world  of 
romance  in  a  name;  and  when  you  whisper 
'*  Guenevere "  to  me,  my  soul  harks  back  to 
Arthur's  court,  mineeygs  look  on  the  queen,  and 
in  a  dream  I  seem  to  see  her  walking  'mid  the 
flowers  of  Camelot;  I  see  her  pause  and^  raise 
her  head  as  on  the  gravel-walk  she  hears  the 
tread  of  Lancelot's  mailed  feet.  And  Mary? 
^Tis  the  name  of  the  Mother  of  God. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

William  Shakespeare;  a  quotation      ...  3 

Pons  Asinorum  :  a  preface  of  parts  ....  7 

Mary!     Mary!  a  play  in  one  act      .      .      .      .  9i 

L'Envoi ^4-3 


AIRY  NOTHINGS, 

OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

WILLIAM  SHAKESPEARE 

Even  a  long  human  life  is  so  brief  and 
fugitive  that  it  seems  little  short  of  a  miracle 
that  it  can  leave  traces  behind  which  endure 
through  centuries.  The  millions  die  and  sink 
into  oblivion  and  their  deeds  die  with  them.  A 
few  thousands  so  far  conquer  death  as  to  leave 
their  names  to  be  a  burden  to  the  memories  of 
school  children,  but  convey  little  else  to  pos- 
terity. But  some  few  master-minds  remain, 
and  among  them  Shakespeare  ranks  with  Leon- 
ardo and  Michael  Angelo.  He  was  hardly 
laid  in  his  grave  than  he  rose  from  if^gain. 
Of  all  the  great  names  of  this  earth,  none  is 
more  certain  of  immortality  than  that  of  Shake- 
speare. .  .  .  And  he  is  not  thirty-six  plays  and 
a  few  poems  jumbled  together  and  read  pele- 
mele,  but  a  man  who  felt  and  thought,  rejoiced 
and  suffered,  brooded,  dreamed,  and  created. 
Far  too  long  has  it  been  the  custom  to  say,  '  We 

3 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

know  nothing  about  Shakespeare';  or,  'An 
octavo  page  would  contain  all  our  knowledge 
of  him.'  Even  Swinburne  has  written  of  the 
intangibility  of  his  personality  in  his  works. 
Such  assertions  have  been  carried  so  far  that  a 
wretched  group  of  dilettanti  has  been  bold 
enough,  in  Europe  and  America,  to  deny  Wil- 
liam Shakespeare  the  right  to  his  own  life-work, 
to  give  to  another  the  honor  due  to  his  genius, 
and  to  bespatter  him  and  his  invulnerable  name 
with  an  insane  abuse  which  has  re-echoed 
through  every  land.   .   .   . 

It  is  the  author's  opinion  that,  given  the  pos- 
session of  forty-five  important  works  by  any 
man,  it  is  entirely  our  fault  if  we  know  nothing 
whatever  about  him.  The  poet  has  incorpo- 
rated his  whole  individuality  in  these  writings, 
and  there,  if  we  can  read  aright,  we  shall  find 
him. 

The  William  Shakespeare  who  was  born  In 
Stratford-on-Avon  in  the  reign  of  Queen  Eliza- 
beth, who  hved  and  wrote  in  London  in  her 
reign  and  that  of  James,  who  ascended  into 
heaven  in  his  comedies  and  descended  into  hell 
in  his  tragedies,  and  died  at  the  age  of  fifty-two 
in  his  native  town,  rises  a  wonderful  personality 
in  grand  and  distinct  outlines,  with  all  the  vivid 
colouring  of  life,  from  the  pages  of  his  books 
before  the  eyes  of  all  who  read  them  with  an 

4 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

open,  receptive  mind,  with  sanity  of  judgment 
and  simple  susceptibility  to  the  power  of 
genius. 

: — Georg  Brandes:  William  Shake- 
speare, A  Critical  Study. 


PONS  ASINORUM 

"  Pope  was  not  a  poet  in  the  true  sense," — 
I  quote  from  Mr.  Arthur  Symons'  The  Ro- 
mantic Movement  in  English  Literature — 
*'  a  born  poet  who  had  the  misfortune  to  be 
modified  by  the  influence  of  the  age  into  which 
he  was  born,  but  a  writer  of  extraordinary  prose 
capacity  and  finish,  who,  if  he  had  lived  in  an- 
other age  and  among  genuine  poets,  would  have 
had  no  more  than  a  place  apart,  admired  for 
the  unique  thing  which  he  could  do,  but  not 
mistaken  for  a  poet  of  true  lineage.  Pope's 
poetic  sensibility  may  be  gauged  by  a  single 
emendation  which  he  made  in  the  text  of  his 
edition  of  Shakespeare.  Shakespeare  had 
made  Antony  say  to  Cleopatra,  '  O  grave 
charm.'  To  Pope  it  seemed  ridiculous  that  a 
light  woman  should  possess  gravity  in  charm. 
He  proposed  '  gay,'  and  nature  seemed  to  be 
reasserted :  '  O  gay  charm  !  '  what  more  prob- 
able and  sufficient?  " 

I 

Nor  was  Pope  alone  in  believing  himself 
capable  of  improving  upon  Shakespeare's  text. 

7 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

Take  the  fantastic  Interlude  of  the  drunken 
porter  in  Macbeth,  Act  II,  3.  It  follows  im- 
mediately upon  the  masterly  scene  between 
Macbeth  and  his  wife  wherein  he  tells  her  that 
he  has  murdered  Duncan,  and  she  upbraids  him 
for  not  having  smeared  the  grooms  with  blood 
that  it  might  seem  their  guilt.  They  leave  the 
stage.  There  is  a  knocking  within,  and  the 
porter  enters,  rubbing  the  sleep  from  his  eyes. 
He  has  been  carousing  with  the  king's  men, 
and,  the  worse  for  wine,  believes  himself  to  be 
keeping  watch  at  hell-gate,  admitting  first  a 
farmer  that  had  hanged  himself,  then  an  equivo- 
cating Jesuit,  and  finally  an  English  tailor. 
'  But  this  place  is  too  cold  to  be  hell; '  and  so 
saying,  he  comes  broad  awake.  Xhe  knocking 
continues.  He  opens  the  gate;  and  Macduff 
enters,  accompanied  by  Lennox.  There  fol- 
lows a  dialogue  between  Macduff  and  the  porter 
on  the  influence  of  drink  upon  erotic  inclination 
and  capacity.  Now  the  Elizabethan  was  a  cur- 
talnless  stage.  A  short  break  in  the  action  of 
the  tragedy  was  required  at  this  point  to  give 
Macbeth  time  to  change  into  his  night-clothes, 
wash  the  blood  from  his  hands,  and  reappear 
with  the  air  of  one  called  up  from  bed.  What 
could  have  been  more  effective  than  this  scene 
which  thrills  Macbeth  and  his  wife  with  terror? 
Who  could  be  abroad  at  this  hour  in  the  morn- 

8 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

ing?     Have  they  been  discovered?     While  It 
may  not  rank  with  the  best  of  Shakespeare's  low 
comedy  interludes,  it  affords  a  striking  contrast 
to  what  goes  before  and  to  what  follows;  it  is 
a  lull  in  the  storm  that  is  sweeping  Macbeth  on 
to  his  doom;  it  affords  the  spectators  some  re- 
lief.    And  yet,  as  is  well  known,  Schiller,  in 
accordance  with  classical  prejudices,  omitted  the 
soliloquy  from  his  translation,  replacing  it  by'^ 
a  pious  morning  song.     But  what  seems  even  \ 
more    remarkable,    Coleridge,    a    presumably  | 
competent  critic,  considered  the  passage  spuri- 
ous —  save  for  one  phrase  too  Shakespearean 
to  reject,  '  the  primrose  way  to  the  everlasting 
bonfire  ' —  and  its  effect  disturbing. 

There  is  a  world  of  difference  between  the 
tone  of  such  corrections  and  the  changes  made 
by  Shakespeare  in  the  old  plays  which  he  re- 
touched for  my  Lord  Chamberlain's  company 
of  players.  What  an  improvement  he  makes, 
sometimes  by  a  mere  rearrangement  of  the 
words,  as  when  Gloucester  says  of  his  wife. 
Henry  VI,  Part  II,  Act  II,  4:  — 

Uneath  may  she  endure  the   flinty  streets 
To  tread  them  with  her  tender-feeling  feet. 

His  sympathy  for  her  echoes  between  the  lines ; 
yet  In  the  original  text  It  was  she  who  spoke 
those  words.     Most  Shakespearean  too  Is  the 

9 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

manner  In  which  York's  two  sons  are  made  to 
draw  their  own  characters,  each  in  a  single  hne, 
when  they  receive  news  of  their  father's  death, 
Henry  VI,  Part  III,  Act  II,  i :  — 

Edward:     O,  speak  no  more!  for  I  have  heard  too 

much. 
Richard:     Say  how  he  died,  for  I  will  hear  it  all. 

There  is  a  line  In  King  Lear,  Act  IV,  7, 
that  has  a  history,  and  shows  how  well  Shake- 
speare understood  what  to  preserve  and  use, 
what  to  discard,  In  the  work  of  his  predecessors. 
The  old  king  Is  borne  sleeping  onto  the  stage. 
The  doctor  orders  music  to  sound,  and  Cor- 
delia says : — 

O  my  dear  father!     Restoration  hang 
Thy  medicine  on  my  lips;  and  let  this  kiss 
Repair  those  violent  harms  that  my  two  sisters 
Have  in  thy  reverence  made! 

Kent:     Kind  and  dear  princess! 

CoR. :     Had  you  not  been  their  father,   these  white 
flakes 
Had  challenged  pity  of  them.     Was  this  a  face 
To  be  opposed  against  the  warring  winds? 
To  stand  against  the  deep  dread-bolted  thunder? 

Lear  stirs  and  wakes;  Cordelia  asks:  — 

How  does  my  royal  lord?     How  fares  your  maj- 
esty? 

10 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

Lear :     You  do  me  wrong  to  take  me  out  o'  the  grave: 
Thou  art  a  soul  in  bliss;  but  I  am  bound 
Upon  a  wheel  of  fire,  that  mine  own  tears 
Do  scald  like  molten  lead. 

(Then  he  comes  to  himself,  asks  where  he  has 
been,  and  where  he  Is;  is  surprised  to  find  the 
day  so  fair ;  remembers  what  he  has  suffered :  — 

Cor.  :     O,  look  upon  me,  sir, 
And  hold  your  hands  in  benediction   o'er  me: 
No,  sir,  you  must  not  kneel. 

Notice  this  last  line.  In  the  old  drama, 
dating  from  1593-4,  and  entitled  The  Chron- 
icle History  of  King  Leir,  this  kneeling  was 
a  prominent  feature.  There  the  king  and 
Perillus,  (Kent),  wandering  about,  almost  per- 
ished, without  food,  without  shelter,  fall  in  with 
Cordelia  and  her  husband,  the  King  of  Gaul; 
the  daughter  recognises  her  father,  and  gives 
him  to  eat  and  drink.  When  he  is  satisfied, 
he  recounts  to  her  the  trials  and  adventures 
through  which  he  and  his  faithful  friend  have 
passed.     Then:  — 

Leir:     O  no  men's  children  are  unkind  but  mine. 
Cordelia:     Condemne    not    all,    because    of    others' 
crime, 
But  looke,  deare  father,  look,  behold  and  see 
Thy  loving   daughter  speaketh   unto  thee. 

{She  kneeles). 
II 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

Leir:     O,  stand  thou  up,  it  is  my  part  to  kneele, 
And  ask  forgiveness  for  my  former  faults 

{He  kneeles). 

The  scene  is  doubtless  beautiful,  but  would 
be  impossible  upon  the  stage  where  two  per- 
sons kneeling  to  each  other  (as  actually  occurs 
in  some  of  Mollere's  comedies)  cannot  but 
produce  a  comic  effect.  Shakespeare  under- 
stood this;  he  was  intimately  acquainted  with 
his  audience,  profoundly  and  practically  versed 
in  stagecraft;  he  knew  how  to  utilise  to  the  best 
advantage  the  good  In  another  man's  work. 
And  yet,  as  Lowell  has  said,  "  scarce  a  com- 
mentator of  them  all,  for  more  than  a  hundred 
years,  but  thought,  as  Alphonso  of  Castile  did 
of  Creation,  that.  If  he  had  only  been  at  Shake- 
speare's elbow,  he  could  have  given  valuable 
advice;  scarce  one  who  did  not  know  off-hand 
that  there  was  never  a  seaport  in  Bohemia  — 
as  if  Shakespeare's  world  were  one  which  Mer- 
cator  could  have  projected;  scarce  one  but  was 
satisfied  that  his  ten  finger-tips  were  a  sufficient 
key  to  those  astronomic  wonders  of  poise  and 
counterpoise,  of  planetary  law  and  cometary 
seeming-exception,  in  his  metres;  scarce  one  but 
thought  he  could  gauge  like  an  ale-firkin  that 
intuition  whose  edging  shallows  may  have  been 
sounded,  but  whose  abysses,  stretching  down 
amid  the  sunless  roots  of  Being  and  Consclous- 

12 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

ness,  mock  the  plummet;  scarce  one  but  could 
speak  with  condescending  approval  of  that 
prodigious  intelligence  so  utterly  without  con- 
gener that  our  baffled  language  must  coin  an 
adjective  to  qualify  it,  and  none  is  so  audacious 
as  to  say  Shakespearean  of  any  other." 

James  Russell  Lowell,  however,  underesti- 
mated our  audacity.  Only  yesterday  Profes- 
sor Henderson  spoke  of  Strindberg  as  a  dram- 
atist truly  Shakespearean  in  range,  power  and 
intensity  of  feeling.  Myself  I  consider  Synge 
to  have  been  almost  Shakespearean  in  his  ca- 
pacity for  sympathy  and  in  the  haunting  beauty 
of  his  prose.  There  are  two  lines  in  Poe's  An- 
nabel Lee :  — 

With    a   love  that   the  winged   seraphs   of   heaven 
Coveted  her  and  me 

Compare  with  this  a  somewhat  similar  passage 
in  The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World:  — 

Pegeen:  [looking  at  him  playfully].  And  it's  that 
kind  of  a  poacher's  love  you'd  make,  Christy  Mahon, 
on  the  sides  of  Neifin,  when  the  night  is  down  ? 

Christy:  It's  little  you'll  think  if  my  love  is  a 
poacher's,  or  an  earl's  itself,  when  you'll  feel  my 
two  hands  stretched  around  you,  and  I  squeezing 
kisses  on  your  puckered  lips,  till  I'd  feel  a  kind  of 
pity  for  the  Lord  God  is  all  ages  sitting  lonesome 
in  his  golden  chair. 

13 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 


II 


Professor  George  Lyman  Kittredge,  in  a  lec- 
ture on  Shakespeare  delivered  at  Harvard  Uni- 
versity, April  23,  19 1 6,  refers  to  Dr.  Johnson 
as  "  one  of  the  most  sensible  and  serviceable 
in  that  long  array  of  professed  Shakespeare- 
ans  " —  and  we  are  all  of  us,  more  or  less,  pro- 
fessed Shakespeareans  — "  that  bids  fair  to 
stretch  out  to  the  crack  of  doom;  "  quotes  the 
learned  doctor  to  the  effect  that  "  men,  in  gen- 
eral, do  not  need  so  much  to  be  informed  as 
to  be  reminded;"  and  thanks  his  honoured 
ghost  for  that  reminder.  And  I  thank  the  pro- 
fessor. There  is  nothing  new  beneath  the  sun; 
all  that  I  shall  say,  men  have  heard  before; 
all  that  you  will  find  here  written  in  my  book, 
I  have  come  by  honestly  —  I  have  stolen  from 
the  books  of  others,  as  the  professor  stole  from 
Boswell.  For  who  is  Dr.  Johnson?  For  us 
a  creation  of  Boswell's.  And  so  it  is  to  Boswell 
that  I  would  direct  your  attention.  He  is  by  no 
means  the  least  of  the  professed  Shakespear- 
eans; he  is  too  often  slighted  by  those  who  feign 
to  love  fine  writing,  too  often  ignored  by  a 
world  that  quotes  him  every  day.  Nor  do  I 
consider  it  blasphemy  to  mention  him  in  the 
same   breath   with   Shakespeare.     There   is   a 

14 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

strange  analogy  between  the  two:  each  is  su- 
preme in  his  own  chosen  field.  Shakespeare 
dramatised  the  lives  of  many  men  and  women  — 
Richard  the  Third,  Viola,  Lear,  Hamlet,  Mac- 
beth and  Portia,  Mercutio,  and  a  vast  company 
of  their  peers;  for  us  they  exist  only  as  he  has 
told  about  them.  And  so  with  Dr.  Johnson. 
Not  in  the  absurdly  dignified  and  laboured  sen- 
tences that  flowed  in  awesome  periods  from  his 
pen,  but  in  the  shrewd  and  brilliant  talk  that  fell 
like  manna  from  his  lips  to  be  gathered  by  his 
friend  and  so  fed  to  the  multitude,  is  contained 
the  whole  man  and  his  romance,  his  amour 
with  life,  his  coquetting  with  death.  Shake- 
speare writing  to  William  Herbert  —  for  my 
part,  I  am  convinced  that  he  was  the  Mr.  W.  H. 
of  the  Dedication  —  said,  Sonnet  XVII:  — 

Who  will  believe  my  verse  in  time  to  come, 

If  it  were  fiU'd  with  your  most  high   deserts? 

But  were  some  child  of  yours  alive  that  time, 
You  should  live  twice  —  in  it  and  in  my  rhyme. 

And  again,  Sonnet  XIX :  — 

Yet,  do  thy  worst,  old  Time;  despite  thy  wrong, 
My  love  shall  in  my  verse  ever  live  young. 

As  Mr.  Shaw  remarks,  'Shakespeare  immor- 
talised Mr.  W.  H.,  as  he  said  he  would,  simply 

15 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

by  writing  about  him.'  Boswell  seems  to  have 
had  some  such  idea  in  mind  regarding  Johnson. 
And  he  was,  as  Henley  has  pointed  out,  fully 
alive  to  the  enduring  merits  of  his  achievement: 
"  I  will  venture  to  say,"  he  wrote,  "  that  he 
(Johnson)  will  be  seen  in  this  work  more  com- 
pletely than  any  man  that  has  ever  lived." 

Nor  is  this  all.  They  have  been  blamed  and 
praised  de  profundis  in  excelsis.  Shakespeare 
is  patronised  by  Broadway;  Macaulay  explicidy 
declares  that  Boswell  wrote  one  of  the  most 
charming  of  books  because  he  was  one  of  the 
greatest  of  fools.  They  have  been  idolised 
perhaps;  but  they  have  suffered  above  the 
average  at  the  hands  of  posterity,  from  the  ig- 
norance of  their  editors  and  the  stupidity  of 
readers  the  world  over.  A  plague  on  ail 
cowards ! 

Ill 

*  Delassons-nous  un  peu  a  parler  de  M.  de 
Pontmartin,'  says  Sainte-Beuve,  at  the  outset 
of  a  causerie.  Not  that  there  is  any  connection 
(to  paraphrase  Mr.  Austin  Dobson)  between 
M.  de  Pontmartin  and  Boswell  of  whom  I  shall 
speak;  nor  —  let  me  hasten  to  add  —  between 
myself  and  '  the  keenest  and  finest  of  French 
literary  critics.'     But  that  Boswell  has  been  for 

i6 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

years  the  cheerful  companion  of  many  an  hour's 
relaxation;  and  I,  for  one,  never  tire  of  refer- 
ring to  him.  Mr.  Augustine  Birrell,  the  most 
charming  of  Johnsonians  —  I  am  everlastingly 
indebted  to  him  for  that  essay  on  Falstaff  —  in- 
sists that  when  he  is  finally  '  kicked  out  of  of- 
fice,' he  will  retire  into  the  country  and  really 
read  Boswell.  An  enviable  ambition!  What 
•is  most  distinctive  in  Boswell  is  Boswell's 
method  and  Boswell's  manner;  yet  from  the 
very  outset,  it  would  seem,  he  was  considerably 
'  edited.'  We  must  forget  his  editors  if  we 
would  '  really  read  Boswell.'  Long  ago  John- 
son, referring  to  the  Corsican  tour,  had  touched 
upon  the  personal  quality  in  his  writings. 
"  Your  History,"  he  said,  "  is  like  other  his- 
tories, but  your  Journal  is  in  a  very  high  degree 
curious  and  delightful  .  .  .  Your  History  was 
copied  from  books;  your  Journal  rose  out  of 
your  own  experience  and  observation.  You  ex- 
press images  which  operated  strongly  upon 
yourself,  and  you  have  impressed  them  with 
great  force  upon  your  readers."  From  less 
friendly  critics  the  verdict  was  the  same.  Mr. 
Austin  Dobson  has  a  very  interesting  note 
on  the  subject.  His  essay,  Boswell's  Prede- 
cessors and  Editors  is  well  worth  reading. 
"  Gray,  who  has  been  '  pleased  and  moved 
strangely,'  declares  it  proves  what  he  has  al- 

17 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

ways  maintained,  '  that  any  fool  may  write  a 
most  valuable  book  by  chance,  if  he  will  only 
tell  us  what  he  heard  and  saw  with  veracity.' 
This  faculty  of  communicating  his  impressions 
accurately  to  his  reader  is  Boswell's  most  con- 
spicuous gift.  Present  in  his  first  book,  it  was 
more  present  in  his  second,  and  when  he  began 
his  great  biography  it  had  reached  its  highest 
point.  So  individual  is  his  manner,  so  unique 
his  method  of  collecting  and  arranging  his  in- 
formation, that  to  disturb  the  native  character 
of  his  narrative  by  interpolating  foreign  ma- 
terial, must  of  necessity  impair  its  specific  char- 
acter and  imperil  Its  personal  note.  Yet,  by 
some  strange  freak  of  fate,  this  was  just  the 
very  treatment  to  which  it  was  subjected."  It 
seems  that  "  Boswell,  like  many  writers  of  his 
temperament,  was  fond  of  stimulating  his  flag- 
ging invention  by  miscellaneous  advice,  and  it 
is  plain  from  the  comparison  of  his  finished 
work  with  his  rough  notes,  that  in  order  to 
make  his  anecdotes  more  direct  and  effective  he 
freely  manipulated  his  reminiscences  ";  much  as 
Shakespeare  manipulated  Plutarch,  Holinshed 
and  the  old  plays  he  rewrote.  "  But  it  is  quite 
probable  —  and  this  is  a  point  that  we  do  not 
remember  to  have  seen  touched  on  —  that  much 
of  the  trimming  which  his  records  received  is 
attributable  to  Malone.     At  all  events,  when 

i8 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

Malone  took  up  the  editing  after  Boswell's 
death,  he  is  known  to  have  made  many  minor 
alterations  in  the  process  of  '  setthng  the  text,' 
and  it  is  only  reasonable  to  suppose  that  he  had 
done  the  same  thing  in  the  author's  lifetime,  a 
supposition  which  would  account  for  some  at 
least  of  the  variations  which  have  been  ob- 
served between  Boswell's  anecdotes  in  their 
earliest  and  their  latest  forms.  But  the  ad- 
mitted alterations  of  Malone  were  but  trifles 
compared  with  the  extraordinary  readjustment 
which  the  book,  as  Malone  left  it,  received  at 
the  hands  of  Mr.  Croker."  Nor  was  Croker 
the  only  offender;  their  name  is  legion — Ma- 
caulay,  Carlyle,  Lockhart,  (writing  to  Mur- 
ray, the  publisher,  Jan.  19,  1829,  he  said,  '  Pray 
ask  Croker  whether  Boswell's  account  of  the 
Hebrldean  Tour  ought  not  to  be  melted  into 
the  book,'  very  much  as  Sir  Herbert  Tree 
*  melted  '  Falstaff  via  the  clothes-basket  out  of 
Henry  IV  into  the  Merry  Wives  of  Windsor) , 
Carruthers,  Fitzgerald  and  who  not.  His  days 
of  sorrowing  are  probably  not  yet  ended,  de- 
spite Henley's  spirited  appeal  that  he  be  given 
without  further  parley  that  high  place  among 
the  great  artists  of  all  time  that  is  his  by  every 
claim  of  genius.  The  Baconians  assail  the  im- 
perturbable figure  of  Shakespeare  much  as  Eng- 
land once  jeered  at  Napoleon  and  the  French 

19 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

or  we  at  England;  why  should  Boswell  be  per- 
mitted to  go  scot-free?  The  heroes  of  an- 
tiquity, erect  above  the  hurrying  crowds,  pre- 
sent a  target  for  posterity  that  wakes  the  urchin 
in  us;  we  cannot  pass  them  by  without  hurling 
an  occasional  stone.     An  occasional  stone  I 

I  own  to  a  very  genuine  affection  for  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw;  I  cannot,  however,  always  find 
it  in  my  heart  to  forgive  him  the  madness  of 
his  pranks.  "  It  was  in  As  You  Like  It  that  the 
sententious  William  first  began  to  openly  ex- 
ploit the  fondness  of  the  British  Public  for 
sham  moralizing  and  stage  philosophizing.  It 
contains  one  passage  that  specially  exasperates 
me.  Jacques,  who  spends  his  time,  like  Ham- 
let, in  vainly  emulating  the  wisdom  of  Sancho 
Panza," —  Mr.  Shaw  forgets  that  the  wisdom 
of  Sancho  Panza  is  the  wisdom  of  the  Spanish 
peasantry,  an  accumulation  of  generations  of 
honest  toil  and  thrifty  living — "comes  in 
laughing  in  a  superior  manner  " —  the,  misin- 
terpretation is  Mr.  Shaw's;  there  was  nothing 
superior  in  the  laughter  of  Mr.  Fuller  Mellish 
when  last  he  played  the  part;  'twas  as  whole- 
hearted as  a  yokel's  at  the  village  fair — "be- 
cause he  has  met  a  fool  In  the  forest  who 

Says  very  wisely,  It  is  ten  o'clock, 

Thus  we  may  see  (quoth  he)  how  the  world  wags. 

20 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

'Tis  but  an  hour  ago  since  it  was  nine; 
After  one  hour  more  'twill  be  eleven. 
And  so  from  hour  to  hour,  we  ripe  and  ripe; 
And  then,  from  hour  to  hour,  we  rot  and  rot; 
And  thereby  hangs  a  tale. 

Now,  considering  that  this  fool's  platitude 
is  precisely  the  philosophy  of  Hamlet,  Mac- 
beth (*  To-morrow  and  to-morrow,  and  to- 
morrow,' etc.),  Prospero,  and  the  rest  of  them, 
there  is  something  unendurably  aggravating  in 
Shakespeare  giving  himself  airs"  with  Touch- 
stone,"—  a  thing  Shakespeare  never  did;  he  re- 
spected motley  as  the  'only  wear';  there  are 
times  in  Lear  when  the  fool  appears  to  "be  the 
only  sane  man  on  the  stage  — "  as  if  he,  the  Im- 
mortal, ever,  even  at  his  sublimest,  had  anything 
different  or  better  to  say  himself."  Mr.  Shaw 
himself  is  not  wholly  guiltless;  and,  mind  you, 
he  was  close  onto  forty,  the  age  at  which  Shake- 
speare composed  Hamlet,  when  he  penned 
the  above.  If  that  '  fool's  platitude  '  is  not  all 
the  wisdom  of  humanity,  (and  Mr.  Shaw  him- 
self has  offered  us  no  better  explanation  of  the 
riddle  of  existence),  neither  is  it  all  the  wisdom 
of  Shakespeare.  '  Behold,'  says  the  Psalmist, 
'  thou  hast  made  my  days  as  it  were  a  span  long : 
and  mine  age  is  even  as  nothing  In  respect  of 
thee;  and  verily  every  man  living  Is  altogether 
vanity.     For  man  walketh  in  a  vain  shadow, 

21 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

and  disquieteth  himself  in  vain:  he  heapeth  up 
riches  and  cannot  tell  who  shall  gather  them.' 
And  again,  '  For  when  thou  art  angry  all  our 
days  are  gone;  we  bring  our  years  to  an  end,  as 
it  were  a  tale  that  is  told.'  '  The  ethical  view 
of  the  universe,'  says  Mr.  Joseph  Conrad  in  A 
Personal  Record,  '  involves  us  at  last  in  so 
many  cruel  and  absurd  contradictions,  where 
I  the  last  vestiges  of  faith,  hope,  charity,  and  even 
I  of  reason  itself,  seem  ready  to  perish,  that  I 
1  have  come  to  suspect  that  the  aim  of  creation 
\  cannot  be  ethical  at  all.  I  would  fondly  be- 
'Jieve  that  its  object  is  purely  spectacular;  a  spec- 
tacle for  awe,  love,  adoration,  or  hate,  if  you 
like,  but  in  this  view — and  in  this  view  alone 
—  never  for  despair !  Those  visions,  delicious 
or  poignant,  are  a  moral  end  in  themselves.' 
And  again,  '  It  Is  sufficient  for  me  to  say:  J'ai 
vecu.  I  have  existed,  obscure  among  the  won- 
ders and  terrors  of  my  time,  as  the  Abbe  Sieyes, 
the  original  utterer  of  the  quoted  words,  had 
managed  to  exist  through  the  violence,  the 
crimes  and  the  enthusiasms  of  the  French 
Revolution.'  *  Never  mind  the  why  and 
wherefore;'  we  live,  to-morrow  we  die;  it  is 
not  asked  of  any  man  that  he  justify  his  own 
existence.  It  Is  the  duty  of  our  fellowsi  to 
make  the  best  possible  use  of  our  talents,  to 
learn  wisdom  from  babes,  to  hear  platitudes 

22 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

from    Mr.    Shaw,    Shakespeare    and   the   rest. 
Vanitas  vanltatum,  all  is  vanity. 


IV 

George  Henry  Lewes  once  declared  that  he 
estimated  his  acquaintances  according  to  their 
estimate  of  Boswell.  By  the  same  token  we 
might  judge  of  the  world.  And  in  hke  man- 
ner it  is  possible  to  appraise  every  poet  and 
dramatist  since  the  reign  of  King  James  solely 
by  what  he  has  written  or  said  concerning  Wil- 
liam Shakespeare.  It  has  been  necessary  for 
me,  in  writing  my  play,  to  read  any  number  of 
volumes  bearing  directly  and  indirectly  upon 
the  Elizabethan  drama;  and  I  have  made  some 
amazing  discoveries.  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett,  for 
instance,  exhibiting  the  hollowness  of  his  crit- 
ical faculty — his  praise  of  Mr.  Conrad's 
Nostromo  is  a  mere  following  of  the  herd 
—  in  the  shrill  cry  of  '  amateur.'  To  any  one 
at  all  versed  in  such  matters  it  is  Mr.  Ben- 
nett and  not  Shakespeare  who  appears  to  be 
the  amateur,  though  I  hesitate  to  degrade  that 
fine  old  word  to  such  base  usage.  Could  Mr. 
Bennett  have  conceived  the  Tragedy  of 
Othello,  or,  being  given  the  story,  have  writ- 
ten out  that  final  scene,   a   technical  triumph, 

23 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

leading  up  as  it  does  to  what  is  perhaps  the 
finest  climax  in  all  literature?  But  I  must  let 
Mr.  Bennett  speak  for  himself:  "  I  tremble  to 
think  what  the  mandarins  and  William  Archer 
would  say  to  the  technique  of  Hamlet,  could 
it  by  some  miracle  be  brought  forward  to-day 
as  a  new  piece  by  a  Mr.  Shakespeare.  They 
would  probably  recommend  Mr.  Shakespeare 
to  consider  the  ways  of  Sardou,  Henri  Bern- 
stein, and  Sir  Herbert  Tree,  and  be  wise. 
Most  positively  they  would  assert  that  Ham- 
let was  not  a  play."  But  why?  Why  should 
Mr.  Bennett  be  so  positive?  What  has  he 
done  to  keep  alive  the  memory  of  William 
Shakespeare  that  he  should  write  in  such  wise 
of  Mr.  Archer  and  Sir  Herbert  Tree?  I  hold 
no  brief  in  Mr.  Archer's  defence,  yet  I  con- 
sider his  notes  on  Hamlet  eminently  sane. 
Is  it  probable  that  he  would  change  his  opinion 
were  Hamlet  a  new  play?  Is  he  in  the 
habit  af  indiscriminately  praising  the  Eliza- 
bethan dramatists?  Mr,  Bennett  had  been  bet- 
ter advised  —  his  book.  The  Author's  Craft 
(I  withhold  the  obvious  pun),  was  published 
in  1914  —  had  he  trembled  to  think  of  James 
Russell  Lowell,  who,  in  1868,  wrote:  "  Many 
years  ago,  while  yet  Fancy  claimed  that  right 
in  me  which  Fact  has  since,  to  my  no  small  loss, 
so  successfully  disputed,  I  pleased  myself  with 

24 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

imagining  the  play  of  Hamlet  published 
under  some  alias,  and  as  the  work  of  a  new 
candidate  in  literature." — A  manifest  impos- 
sibility, as  Lowell  must  have  known,  since 
Hamlet  is  obviously  the  work  of  a  mature 
genius,  grown  wise  through  years  of  experience. 
— "  Then  I  played,  as  children  say,  that  it  came 
in  regular  course  before  some  well-meaning 
doer  of  criticisms,  who  had  never  read  the  orig- 
inal (no  very  wild  assumption  as  things  go), 
and  endeavoured  to  conceive  the  kind  of  way 
in  which  he  would  be  likely  to  take  it.  I  put 
myself  in  his  place,  and  tried  to  write  such  a 
perfunctory  notice  as  I  thought  would  be  likely, 
in  filling  his  column,  to  satisfy  his  conscience. 
But  it  was  a  tour  de  force  quite  beyond  my 
power  to  execute  without  a  grimace."  Not  so 
with  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett,  as  we  have  seen;  he 
keeps  a  straight  face  while  he  blackguards  the 
man  to  whom  we  in  England  and  America  owe 
the  best  of  our  knowledge  of  Ibsen,  the  man 
to  whom,  as  editor  of  the  poems  of  Alan  Seeger, 
we  in  America  are  especially  indebted.  Pos- 
sibly Mr.  Bennett  is  angry  with  Mr.  Archer; 
possibly  he  has  not  forgiven  him  for  pointing 
out  that,  as  newspaper  plays  go.  The  Earth 
by  Mr.  James  B.  Fagan  is  a  better  play  than 
Mr.  Bennett's  What  the  Public  Wants  be- 
cause  '  it  deals  logically  with   the  theme   an- 

25 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

nounced,  instead  of  wandering  away  into  all 
sorts  of  irrelevances,'  —  such  as  '  making  his 
Napoleon  of  the  press  a  native  of  the  Five 
Towns;  '  be  that  as  it  may,  I  am  angry  with 
Mr.  Bennett.  Why  should  he  presume  to  use 
Shakespeare  for  a  stalking-horse? 


And  Mr.  John  Masefield.  He  takes  his  cue 
from  Mr.  William  Butler  Yeats  to  such  an 
extent  that  where  Mr.  Yeats  speaks  of  Henry 
the  Fifth,  in  quotation  marks,  as  '  Shake- 
speare's only  hero,'  Mr.  Masefield  must  per- 
force go  on  and  reduce  the  statement  to  an  ab- 
surdity by  adding  that  '  Shakespeare  was  too 
wise  to  count  any  man  a  hero.'  As  though  men 
were  ever  that  wise,  or  foolish.  To  the  oaf 
(perhaps)  all  men  are  oafs,  but  to  the  man  of 
vision  the  greatness  of  his  fellows  is  as  ap- 
parent as  the  salt  of  the  sea.  Faulconbridge, 
Richard  the  Third,  Othello,  Lear,  Harry  Hot- 
spur; are  they  not  all  of  heroic  stature  as  surely 
as  is  the  David  of  Michael  Angelo?  I  do  not 
forget  Mr.  Masefield  his  puerile  reading  be- 
tween the  lines;  but  I  am  so  enamoured  of  the 
prose  of  Mr.  Yeats  that  I  cannot  find  it  in  my 
heart  to  quarrel  with  his  conclusions,  though  he 
insist,  (as  he  does),  that '  the  world  was  almost 

26 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

as  empty  in  the  eyes  of  Shakespeare  as  It  is  in 
the  eyes  of  God/  God  looked  out  upon  the 
world  and  found  it  good.  I  have  an  idea  that 
Shakespeare  was  in  no  haste  to  leave  this  vale 
of  tears.  He  was  not  aweary  of  the  world; 
neither  is  God. 

But  to  return  to  Mr.  Masefield.  He  says 
of  Shakespeare's  women:  *  The  playing  of 
feminine  roles  by  boys  limited  his  art  and  kept 
his  women  within  the  range  of  thought  and 
emotion  likely  to  be  understood  by  boys.' 
Limited  his  art?  Just  what  does  Mr.  Mase- 
field mean?  The  Elizabethan  was  an  open-air 
theatre,  and  plays  were  presented  in  the  after- 
noon by  the  light  of  the  sun;  it  was  therefore 
necessary  for  Shakespeare  in  writing  the  Mer- 
chant of  Venice,  Act  V.  i.  to  invoke  before  the 
eyes  of  his  audience  such  a  picture  of  the  night 
as  would  be  forever  memorable  in  the  litera- 
ture of  the  world :  — 

The  moon  shines  bright:  in  such  a  night  as  this, 
When  the  sweet  wind  did  gently  kiss  the  trees 
And  they  did  make  no  noise,  in  such  a  night 
Troilus  methinks  mounted  the  Troyan  walls 
And  sigh'd  his  soul  toward  the  Grecian  tents, 
Where  Cressid  lay  that  night. 

On  such  a  night  as  well  might  beggar  the  arti- 
fice of  Mr.  Belasco  did  he  venture  to  reproduce 
27 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

its  magic,  did  young  Lorenzo  swear  his  love 
for  Jessica.  Shakespeare's  art  knew  no  such 
formal  limitations  as  does  the  theatre  of  to-day. 
So  far  as  we  can  judge  no  woman  has  yet 
sounded  the  deeps  of  Juliet's  nature;  Rosalind 
eludes  the  cleverest  of  her  imitators;  Viola  re- 
mains the  loveliest  heroine  that  ever  graced  a 
printed  page. 

VI 

But  what,  as  Mr.  Shaw  once  remarked  anent 
our  actors,  are  we  to  think  of  America,  my 
native  land,  the  country  that  gave  credence  to 
the  Baconian  theory?  Are  we  in  all  honesty 
a  nation  of  villagers,  bumpkins  at  Bartholomew 
Fair,  to  be  taken  in  by  the  first  glib  spieler 
shouting  above  the  clamour  of  the  crowd?  In 
1856  a  Mr.  William  Smith  issued  a  privately 
printed  letter  to  Lord  Ellesmere,  in  which  he 
put  forth  the  opinion  that  William  Shakespeare 
was,  by  reason  of  his  birth  and  upbringing,  in- 
capable of  writing  the  plays  attributed  to  him. 
One  might  as  reasonably  argue  that  Lincoln 
was  incapable  of  the  Gettysburg  Speech,  or  that 
you,  dear  reader,  cannot  speak  French  since  you 
were,  unfortunately,  born  in  Yonkers.  But  the 
delusion  did  not  take  on  a  serious  aspect  until, 
in  the  same  year,  a  Miss  Delia  Bacon  put  for- 

28 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

ward  the  same  theory  In  several  American 
magazines:  her  namesake  Francis  Bacon,  and 
not  Shakespeare,  was  the  author  of  the  plays. 
In  the  following  year  she  published  a  quite  un- 
readable book  on  the  subject.  She  died  insane. 
Close  on  her  heels,  however,  followed  an- 
other American,  Judge  Nathaniel  Holmes,  with 
a  book  of  no  fewer  than  696  pages,  filled  with 
denunciations  of  the  vagabond  William  Shake- 
speare, who,  though  he  could  scarcely  write  his 
own  name  and  knew  no  other  ambition  than 
that  of  money-grubbing,  had  appropriated  half 
the  renown  of  the  great  Bacon.  Since  then  my 
fellows  this  side  the  seas  have  published  thou- 
sands of  volumes  upon  the  subject;  the  stench 
of  their  mental  rottenness  reeks  to  the  doors 
of  Valhalla.  And  yesterday  we  scaled  the 
heights,  we  reached  the  summit:  a  Chicago 
court  solemnly  handed  down  a  decision  confirm- 
ing Bacon's  authorship. 


VII 

Why  is  it  that  people  say,  '  We  know  noth- 
ing about  William  Shakespeare?'  Just  what 
is  it  that  we  do  not  know?  We  know  when  he 
was  born  and  where,  his  father's  name,  his 
mother's  name,  their  occupations  and  their  po- 
29 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

sitlon  In  society;  we  know  whom  he  married, 
when,  where,  and  why;  what  vocation  he  fol- 
lowed, and  how  he  prospered;  where  he  lived, 
and  when  and  where  he  died  —  more,  all  that 
he  thought  and  did  worthy  of  preservation  has 
been  preserved  for  three  long  centuries,  and  is 
to-day  cherished  as  is  the  work  of  no  other 
man,  living  or  dead;  his  very  name  connotes 
more  than  any  other  word  in  our  language. 
How  can  any  one  say,  '  An  octavo  page  would 
contain  all  our  knowledge  of  him?'  Should 
we  not  include  the  plays  —  the  tragedies,  the 
comedies,  the  histories  —  in  our  knowledge  of 
Shakespeare?  Do  we  know  more  of  Mr. 
Roosevelt,  or  understand  him  better,  because 
for  years  he  has  been  featured  in  the  press,  be- 
cause his  face  has  become  as  familiar  as  is  the 
caress  of  a  barmaid?  I  have  followed  Mr. 
Roosevelt's  career  with  no  little  interest,  have 
even  read  some  of  his  books,  and  yet  I  confess 
myself  no  better  acquainted  with  him  than  with 
the  rest  of  humanity's  eminent  figures.  I  could 
not  for  the  life  of  me  tell  you  Mrs.  Roosevelt's 
maiden  name,  whereas  every  schoolboy  has 
heard  of  Anne  Hathaway  in  Shottery-side. 
What  Mr.  Roosevelt  thinks  of  Shakespeare  re- 
mains, for  me  at  least,  as  great  a  mystery  as  the 
riddle  of  the  Sphinx,  and  is  of  about  as  much 
importance;  whereas  I  knowjwhat  Shakespeare 

30 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

would  have  thought  of  Mr.  Roosevelt:  he  has 
painted  his  portrait  full-length  in  Harry  Hot- 
spur, outspoken,  impulsive,  avid  of  honour,  the 
popular  idol  par  excellence,  the  man  who  set 
Bolingbroke  upon  the  throne  only  later  to  revolt 
against  him  and  go  down  in  defeat  vainly  striv- 
ing to  overthrow  his  reign;  he  was,  as  is  Mr. 
Roosevelt,  a  hero  after  the  heart  of  Merrie 
England  and  Young  America,  and  as  such 
Shakespeare  loved  him  and  overlooked  his 
many  faults. 

VIII 

He,  Shakespeare,  is  one  of  my  intimates.  I 
can  think  of  no  one,  with  the  possible  exception 
of  Mr.  Shaw,  who  has  so  permeated  my  life 
with  the  genius  of  his  personality.  Can  it  be 
that  I  know  nothing  of  a  man  with  whom  I  am 
as  well  acquainted  as  ever  I  was  with  my  father, 
simply  because  I  cannot  be  certain  whether  he 
dined  at  the  Mermaid  or  the  Devil  Tavern  on 
Sundays,  and  where  and  with  whom  he  slept  o' 
nights?  Such  details  are  of  no  importance; 
and,  even  though  they  were,  Shakespeare  was 
right  in  preserving  a  certain  amount  of  secrecy 
with  regard  to  his  amours.  When  Heine  said 
of  de  Musset,  '  He  is  a  young  man  with  a 
splendid  past,'   he  dismissed  de   Musset  as  a 

31 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

man  with  a  future;  but  Shakespeare  had  no 
past;  if  ever  a  man  died  to  rise  again,  if  ever 
a  man  was  born  lord  of  the  after-ages,  'twas 
this  same  Will  of  Stratford-town.  Those  in 
search  of  tattle  may  turn  to  George  Moore  and 
the  decadent  poets  and  painters  from  whom  he 
has  taken  his  cue;  for  my  part,  I  see  something 
of  the  nobleness  of  Shakespeare's  character  in 
this  very  reticence  of  his  —  and  this  is  scarce 
an  attribute  of  dramatists,  reticence:  Jonson 
wearied  Drummond,  while  his  guest  at  Haw- 
thornden  for  two  weeks,  by  talking  almost  in- 
cessantly of  himself;  Mr.  Shaw's  first  preface 
was  mainly  about  Mr.  Shaw,  and  he  has  spent 
the  remainder  of  his  life  living  up  to  that  pref- 
ace. I  do  not  agree  with  Mr.  Moore  that 
after  twenty-four  an  artist's  affairs  of  the  heart 
are  but  so  much  raw  material  for  literature. 
If  we  cannot  immortalize  our  loves  save  by 
dragging  them  into  the  confessional  and  there 
shouting  so  loudly  concerning  our  intimacies 
that  all  the  congregation  hears  and  is  most 
improperly  shocked,  we  are  unworthy  any 
woman's  love,  be  she  courtesan  or  queen,  we 
are  the  merest  braggarts,  like  pimps  we  would 
fatten  on  her  shame  and  should  be  rudely 
silenced.  Surely  it  is  a  kindlier  fate  that  has 
befallen  the  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets  than 
ever  fell  to  the  lot  of  any  other  woman  kissed 

32 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

by  any  other  poet  since  Pan  first  piped  in  Ar- 
cady;  I'll  warrant  she  is  not  jealous  of  your 
inamorata,  or  of  mine. 


IX 

And  who  was  this  same  Dark  Lady  of  the 
Sonnets?  In  his  preface  Mr.  Shaw  says  that 
he  has  identified  her,  very  reluctantly,  with 
Mistress  Mary  Fitton.  Of  course,  he  has. done 
nothing  of  the  sort;  'tis,  as  the  critics  would 
say,  but  another  of  his  joties.  He  has  named 
a  weak  wailing  creature  of  his  fancy  Mary;  he 
had  as  well  boast  that  he  has  identified  the  Dark 
Lady  with  the  Mother  of  Christ.  'Tis  not 
Mistress  Fitton  that  cries  for  mercy  from  out 
the  pages  of  his  book;  we  are  too  well  ac- 
quainted with  her,  thanks  to  Thomas  Tyler,  to 
be  deluded  by  any  such  sham  christening.  And 
yet  Mr.  Shaw  was  present,  as  it  were,  at  the 
birth  of  the  Fitton  theory;  he  went  so  far 
as  to  quote  to  Thomas  Tyler  from  Euphues 
Golden  Legacie.  He  has  indeed  since  gone  to 
even  greater  lengths  —  he  has  made  of  Thomas 
Tyler  a  truly  fascinating  figure,  a  specialist  in 
pessimism,  delighting  in  a  hideous  conception 
which  he  was  pleased  to  call  the  Theory  of 
Cycles,  according  to  which  the  history  of  man- 

33 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

kind  and  the  universe  keeps  on  repeating  itself 
without  the  slightest  variation  throughout  all 
eternity;  he  had  a  goitre,  and,  according  to  his 
theory,  he  and  that  goitre  have  been  haunting 
this  earth  of  ours  for  thousands  and  thousands 
of  years;  may  he,  on  his  next  visit  to  us,  derive 
as  great  pleasure  from  Mr.  Shaw's  preface 
as  I  have  derived,  through  Mr.  Shaw,  from 
my  so  short  acquaintance  with  himself 
as  he  was  in  the  flesh.  I  cannot  do 
better  than  to  quote  from  his  edition  of  the 
Sonnets  —  I  was  lucky  enough  to  pick  up  a  copy 
at  second-hand  in  Washington;  it  is  very  rare: 
"  The  dark  lady  of  the  Sonnets  has  been  com- 
pared with  Cleopatra.  Thus  Professor  Dow- 
den:  '  May  we  dare  to  conjecture  that  Cleo- 
patra, queen  and  courtesan,  black  from  "  Phoe- 
bus' amorous  pinches,"  a  "  lass  unparalleled," 
has  some  kinship  through  the  imagination  with 
the  dark  lady  of  the  virginals?'  And  the 
queenly  commanding  qualities  of  Mistress  Fit- 
ton  are  not  to  be  mistaken.  Her  character  in 
its  strength  (Sonnet  CL,  line  7),  resembles  that 
of  her  royal  mistress  who  declared,  '  I  have  the 
heart  of  a  king,  and  of  a  king  of  England,  too.' 
She  could,  on  occasion,  as  we  learn  from  Mrs. 
Martin,  in  a  document  in  the  Record  Office,  tuck 
up  her  clothes,  take  off  her  head-dress,  and,  at- 

34 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

tired  in  a  large  white  cloak,  march  off  '  as  though 
she  had  been  a  man  '  to  meet  the  Earl  of  Pem- 
brolce  outside  the  court.  It  is  entirely  in  accord- 
ance with  Mrs.  Martin's  description  that  Mis- 
tress Fitton  takes  the  lead  at  the  masque  and 
dance  at  Blackfriars,  and  that  she  it  is  who  asks 
Elizabeth  to  dance,  telling  her  that  her  name  is 
Affection."  And  a  very  pretty  picture  we  get 
of  her  there  at  that  dance;  at  the  marriage  of 
Anne  Russell,  the  queen's  favourite  maid  of 
honour,  to  Lord  Herbert;  a  very  pretty  pic- 
ture,—  even  Miss  Agnes  Strickland  seems  to 
have  been  taken  with  it:  "After  supper,  the 
mask  came  in,  and  delicate  it  was  to  see  eight 
ladies  so  prettily  dressed.  Mrs.  Fitton  led; 
and  after  they  had  done  their  own  ceremonies, 
these  eight  lady-maskers  chose  eight  ladies 
more  to  dance  the  measures.  '  Mistress  Fit- 
ton  went  to  the  queen  and  wooed  her  to 
dance.  Her  majesty  asked  the  name  of  the 
character  she  personified;  she  answered,  "Af- 
fection." "Affection!"  said  the  queen;  "af- 
fection's false";  yet  her  majesty  rose  and 
danced.'  "  And  if  a  queen  could  not  refuse  her 
entreaties,  what  of  a  poor  player?  We  cannot 
connect  her  directly  with  William  Shakespeare, 
yet  I  think  that  Sir  Sidney  Lee,  the  might- 
iest of  the  scoffers,  will  not  to-day  deny  that  her 

35 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

name  is  forever  linked  with  Shakespeare's ;  there 
has  been  controversy  enough  pro  and  con  to  im- 
mortalise a  dozen  light  o'  loves. 

And  she  makes  a  very  pretty  picture  on  the 
stage,  so  why  should  I  apologise  for  Introducing 
her  into  my  play?  Or,  indeed,  why  should  Mr. 
Shaw?  Why  should  he  be  In  such  haste  to  ac- 
cept the  later  suggestions  of  Mr.  Arthur  Ache- 
son?  They  are  the  merest  cobweb-spinning. 
"  In  Henry  IV,  Part  I,"  says  Mr.  Acheson, 
*'  the  relations  of  the  Prince  and  Falstaff  reflect 
Southampton's  Intimacy  with  the  witty  but  un- 
principled Florlo."  Mr.  Acheson  has  not  an 
iota  of  proof  to  offer  for  any  such  statement; 
and  why  he  should  speak  of  Florlo  as  either 
witty  or  unprincipled  only  Mr.  Acheson  knows. 
"  My  hostess  of  the  tavern,"  he  continues  In  the 
same  absurdly  Achesonlan  manner,  "  is,"  if  you 
please,  "  the  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets,  Mis- 
tress Davenant  of  the  George  Inn,"  with  whom, 
according  to  Mr.  Acheson,  both  Shakespeare 
and  Southampton  were  in  love.  Listen  then, 
Henry  IV,  Part  I,  Act  I,  2,  to  the  Prince's 
first  mention  of  Mistress  Quickly,  the  Prince  re- 
flecting the  feelings  of  Southampton  In  love: 
"  Why,  what  a  pox  have  I  to  do  with  my  hostess 
of  the  tavern?"  Surely  we  cannot  afford  to 
have  anything  more  to  do  with  her,  or  with  Mr, 
Acheson,  after  that. 

36 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 


X 

For  centuries,  as  Sir  Henry  Newbolt  points 
out  in  his  admirable  New  Study  of  English 
Poetry,  a  controversy,  always  ardent,  often- 
times violent,  has  raged  concerning  the  Classi- 
cal and  Romantic  in  Art.  The  Impersonal 
theory,  with  the  prestige  of  a  Greek  ancestry, 
had  at  first  undisputed  possession  of  the  field; 
but  it  was  never  more  than  a  theory.  In  prac- 
tice the  Greek  artist,  like  every  other  human 
artist,  expressed  in  his  work  the  intuitions  of  his 
own  spirit.  But  this  was  not  the  account  of  him 
given  by  contemporary  critics;  his  sole  aim,  ac- 
cording to  them,  was  to  produce  a  certain  effect 
upon  his  audience.  A  work  of  art,  they  argued, 
according  to  Professor  Butcher  In  his  edition  of 
Aristotle's  Poetics,  should  be  '  a  realisation 
of  Its  own  Idea,'  and  so  objectively  perfect. 
But,  as  Sir  Henry  asks.  Is  a  poem  or  a  picture  a 
living  personality  that  It  should  have  an  Idea  of 
its  own,  and  so  'realise'  that  Idea?  Such 
playing  with  words  Is  not  only  futile  but  dan- 
gerous. Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass  is 
not  a  thing  in  the  Red  Queen's  dream,  but  a 
dreamer  herself.  And  the  theory  Is  Impossible 
In  practice.  Professor  Mackail,  in  his  Oxford 
Lectures,  after  telling  us  that  '  the  pure  Greek 

37 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

mind  was  the  least  romantic  of  all  in  history,' 
and  that  in  the  Iliad  and  Odyssey  '  the  personal 
note  is  as  completely  absent  as  it  can  possibly  be 
from  any  piece  of  human  workmanship,'  goes 
on  to  make  admissions  which  show  that  the  pos- 
sibility is  far  from  being  complete.  The  Iliad  is 
*  instinct  with  a  certain  ardour  from  beginning 
to  end  ' ;  '  this  ardour  is  what  sets  it  apart  from 
all  other  poetry.'  In  the  Odyssey  there  are 
personal  touches  eloquent  of  personal  experi- 
ence. When  we  read  of  the  poor  maidservant 
in  Ithaca  who  had  to  go  on  grinding  corn  all 
night,  we  know  that  there  is  here  '  a  touch  of 
something  actual  that  had  come  to  the  poet  him- 
self and  struck  sharply  through  him  the  sense 
of  the  obscure  labour  and  unsung  pain  that  un- 
derlie the  high  pageant  of  life,  war,  and  adven- 
ture.' Later  he  speaks  of  the  '  incommunica- 
ble personal  quality  which  Theocritus  brought  to 
poetry,'  and  in  his  Introduction  to  the  Greek 
Anthology  he  traces  the  development  of  the  psy- 
chological element  down  to  Meleager. 

Though  the  Greek  theory  never  quite  dies 
out,  the  practice  of  artists  everywhere  has  given 
it  *  the  lie  direct'  The  influence  of  M.  Ana- 
tole  France  has  done  much  to  discredit  it 
among  the  younger  critics.  For  centuries  the 
first  sonnet  of  Sidney's  Astrophel  and  Stella 
has  been  the  credo  of  the  poets: — 
38 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

Loving 'in  truth,  and  fain  in  verse  my  love  to  show, 
That  she,  deare  Shee,  might  take  some  pleasure  of 

my  paine  — 
Pleasure  might  cause  her  reade,  reading  might  make 

her  know, 
Knowledge  might  pitie  winne,  and  pitie  grace  ob- 

taine  — 
I  sought  fit  words  to  paint  the  blackest  face  of  woe, 
Studying    inventions    fine,    her   wits    to    entertaine, 
Oft  turning  others'  leaves,  to  see  if  thence  would 

flow  \ 

Some    fresh    and    fruitful   showers    upon    my    sun-    ' 

burn'd  brain. 

But  words  came  halting  forth,  wanting  Invention's 

stay: 
Invention,  Nature's  childe,  fled  step  dame  Studie's 

blowes : 
And  others'  feet  still  seemed  but  strangers  in  my 

way. 
Thus  great  with  child  to  speak,  and  helpless  in  my 

throwes, 
Biting  my  trewand  pen,  beatinge  myselfe  for  spite  — 
Fool,  said  my  IVIuse  to  me,  looke  in  thy  hearte  and 

write ! 

But,  as  has  been  said,  this  is  poetry,  not  argu- 
ment; what  of  the  controversy?  In  one  of  his 
Conversations  with  Eckermann,  Goethe  said : 
'  The  style  of  a  writer  is  a  true  impression  of 
his  Inner  self,  if  any  one  would  write  a  clear 
style,  let  him  first  have  clearness  in  his  own  soul; 
39 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

and  if  any  one  would  write  a  great  style,  let  him 
see  to  it  that  he  have  a  great  character.'  In 
another  Conversation  he  put  it  even  more 
strongly:  '  It  is  the  personal  character  of  the 
writer  that  brings  his  meaning  before  his  read- 
ers, not  the  artifices  of  his  talents.'  And 
again:  'The  artist  must  work  from  within 
outwards,  seeing  that,  make  what  contortions  he 
will,  he  can  only  bring  to  light  his  own  individu- 
ality.' Joubert  was  even  more  dogmatic: 
'  Objects  should  never  be  described  except  for 
the  purpose  of  describing  the  feelings  they 
arouse  in  us,  for  language  ought  to  represent  at 
the  same  moment  the  thing  and  the  author,  the 
subject  and  the  thought;  everything  that  we  say 
ought  to  be  dyed  with  us,  with  the  soul  of  us.' 
We  are  reminded  of  Coleridge's  '  infallible  test 
of  a  blameless  style  —  its  untranslateableness  in 
words  of  the  same  language  without  injury  to 
the  meaning;  language  is  framed  to  convey  not 
the  object  alone,  but  likewise  the  character, 
mood,  and  intentions  of  the  person  who  is  repre- 
senting it.' 

XI 

What  then  of  Mr.  John  Masefield's  criti- 
cism of  Love's  Labour's  Lost?     "The  play 
is  full  of  the  problem  of  what  to  do  with  the 
40 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

mind.  Shall  it  be  filled  with  study,  or  spent  In 
society,  or  burnt  in  a  passion,  or  tortured  by 
strivings  for  style,  or  left  as  it  is?  Intellect  is  a 
problem  to  itself.  Something  of  the  problem 
seems  (it  would  be  wrong  to  be  more  certain)  to 
have  made  this  play  not  quite  impersonal,  as 
good  art  should  be."  Not  quite  impersonal! 
All  good  art  is  intensely  personal,  is  autobiogra- 
phy, the  record  of  the  adventures  of  one's  mind 
in  a  world  of  dreams.  I  confess  I  cannot  un- 
derstand Mr.  Masefield.  Here  is  a  poet  with  a 
personal  vision,  an  individual  viewpoint,  a  mes- 
sage of  his .  own,  a  message  that  resounds 
throughout  the  English-speaking  world,  align- 
ing himself  with  the  most  unimaginative  of  the 
commentators.  Turning  his  back  upon  the  old 
free  life  that  formed  his  character,  denying  the 
gods  of  wind  and  wave  that  nursed  his  infant 
muse,  he  sells  his  heritage  for  a  mess  of  profes- 
sorial homage,  accepts  without  question  the 
dicta  of  the  theorists;  Holofernes  prosing  his 
prattle  before  the  mightiest  dreamer  born  of 
woman. 

Love's  Labour's  Lost  is,  as  Dr.  Brandes 
has  pointed  out,  a  play  of  two  motives.  The 
first  is,  of  course,  love  —  what  else  should  be 
the  theme  of  a  youthful  poet's  first  comedy? 
The  second  is  language,  poetic  expression  for  its 
own  sake  —  a  subject  round  which  all  the  medi- 
41 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

tations  of  Shakespeare  must  have  centred,  as, 
in  the  midst  of  new  impressions,  he  set  about  the 
formation  of  a  vocabulary  and  a  style. 

Mr.  Masefield  has  misread  Love's  Labour's 
Lost.  It  was  Shakespeare's  intent  to  satirise 
the  over-luxuriant  and  far-fetched  modes  of  ex- 
pression that  were  characteristic  of  his  age  and 
of  ours: — 

HoLOFERNES:  The  posterior  of  the  day,  most  gen- 
erous sir,  is  liable,  congruent  and  measureable  for 
the  afternoon:  the  word  is  well  cuU'd,  chosen; 
sweet  and  apt,  I  do  assure  you,  sir;  I  do  assure. 

while  Biron  cries: — 

Lend  me  the  flourish  of  all  gentle  tongues, — 
Fie,  painted  rhetoric! 

Mr.  Masefield's  theories  concerning  Shakes- 
peare are,  if  the  truth  be  known,  not  his  own, 
but  Mr.  Yeats'  or  those  of  the  Cambridge  edi- 
tors. And  yet  make  what  contortions  he  will, 
assume  the  most  owlish  and  scholarly  of  expres- 
sions, we  see,  beneath  the  lion's  fell,  '  a  very 
gentle  beast'  Mr.  Masefield  cannot  escape  his 
own  personality.  He  comes  away  from  Shakes- 
peare unchanged.  Years  later  he  writes  of  the 
Anzac  Expedition  with  a  verbal  grandiosity  that 
Is  rather  sickening,  that  belies  the  mute  heroism 
of  the  men  who  fought  and  died  so  bravely  bat- 
42 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

tling  vainly  against  the  Turks.  As  Mr.  Francis 
Hackett  points  out,  in  a  recent  review  of  Mr. 
Masefield's  work,  he  (Mr.  Masefield)  too  often 
attempts  to  be  a  httle  nobler  than  life.  '  A 
great  writer  takes  beauty  by  the  hand.'  In  the 
Tragedy  of  Nan  Mr.  Masefield  is  too  lofty, 
strutting  among  the  stars,  as  It  were,  on  stilts; 
he  seems  to  be  carried  away  by  the  glamour  of 
his  subject;  he  cannot  write  as  people  speak. 
But  why?  Apparently  because  he  believes  that 
there  are  phrases  lovelier  than  life,  more  ex- 
quisite than  nature,  more  instinct  with  romance  j 
than  is  humanity.  It  was  to  ridicule  any  such  / 
credo  that  Shakespeare  wrote  the  greater  part 
of  Love's  Labour's  Lost :  — 


Taffeta  phrases,  silken  terms  precise, 
TKree  pil'd  hyperboles,  spruce  affectati 
Figures  pedantical :  these  summer-flies 


Three  pil'd  hyperboles,  spruce  affectation,       \ 
Figures  pedantical :  these  summer-flies  \ 

Have  blown  me  full  of  maggot  ostentation,    j 
I  do  forswear  them;  and  I  here  protest. 
By  this  white  glove,    (how  white  the   hand,   God 

knows, ) 
Henceforth  my  wooing  mind  shall  be  express'd 
In  russet  yeas,  and  honest  kersey  noes.  / 

True  the  parody  Is  often  as  tediouj  as  the 
mannerisms  It  would  ridicule, —  but  Shakes- 
peare was  young.  Not  until  A  Midsummer 
Night's  Dream  do  we  find  him  rising  to  the 
full  height  of  his  genius.  And  what  a  rise  It 
43 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

was,  Illumining  the  world!  Surely  his  sun  has 
never  set  since  the  dawn  that  followed  that  night 
in  June. 

XII 

Professor  Kittredge,  in  the  address  referred 
to,  ridicules  rather  roughly,  or  so  it  seems 
to  me,  those  who  profess  to  discover  something 
of  Shakespeare's  personality  in  his  plays.  "  If 
Hamlet  is  Shakespeare,  so  also  is  Claudius,  and 
so  are  Banquo  and  Fluellen,  Falstaff  and  Prince 
Hal.  .  .  .  All  are  authentic,  all  are  genuine,  all 
are  sincere.  .  .  .  Each,  therefore,  contains 
some  fragment  of  Shakespeare's  nature,  or  reg- 
isters some  reaction  of  his  idiosyncrasy.  That 
is  most  certain.  But  how  shall  we  tackle  this 
stupendous  problem  in  biochemistry?"  Who 
said  'Hamlet  is  Shakespeare?'  Shakespeare 
stands  sponsor  for  Hamlet,  for  Falstaff,  for 
Prince  Hal,  as  Mr.  Shaw  for  his  Candida,  or 
for  Anne,  Shaw's  Anne,  and  his  alone.  The 
professor  is  destroying  a  monster  of  his  own 
creation,  "  a  compendium  of  humanity,  a  com- 
posite photograph,  quite  destitute  of  salient  fea- 
tures, which,"  as  he  says,  "  is  assuredly  not 
Shakespeare."  And  yet  Shakespeare  was  the 
creator  of  this  '  compendium  of  humanity.' 
Reflected  there  we  see  the  heart  of  him,  '  great 

44 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

with  child  to  speak.'  As  every  wayside  flower 
lifts  up  its  head  to  sing  in  praise  of  God,  so 
Falstaff,  Lear,  Dogberry,  Brutus,  Caliban  and 
all  the  rest  tell  all  day  long  of  that  great  soul 
that  yearned  them  into  being.  I  cannot  do  bet- 
ter than  quote  Sir  Henry  Newbolt  In  support  of 
my  contention  that  the  poet  who  exhibits  so  in- 
tense an  Interest  in  the  personality  of  others,  not 
only  in  his  plays,  but  in  his  sonnets :  — 

What  is  your  substance,  whereof  are  you  made 
That  millions  of  strange  shadows  on  you  tend  ? 

who  knew  that  none  could  say  more  of  his  be- 
loved — ■ 

Than  this  rich  praise  that  you  alone  are  you; 

would  have  been  the  last  man  in  this  world,  born 
king  of  so  limitless  a  realm  as  the  fair  field  of 
his  fancy,  to  forego  his  heritage  and  live  self- 
exiled  In  his  art. 

"  It  is  a  matter  of  common  agreement  that 
Shakespeare  the  Dramatist  had  a  power  that 
may  be  called  infinite  and  hidden:  infinite,  be- 
cause It  Is  exhibited  in  a  whole  world  of  life: 
hidden,  because  It  Is  exhibited  only  through  the 
inhabitants  of  that  world  and  never  apart  from 
them.  But  to  add  to  this  the  words  '  impas- 
sive '  and  'impersonal'  (as  Flaubert  does)  is 
a  violent  contradiction  in  terms.  Activity  and 
45 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

personality  cannot  be  found  anywhere  in  a 
higher  degree  than  in  Shakespeare's  combina- 
tion of  creative  force  and  ingenuous  artistic  con- 
centration. He  does  not,  as  does  Flaubert, 
treat  men  as  he  would  treat  mastodons  or  croco- 
diles for  a  museum ;  he  does  not  stuff  them  with 
straw;  what  he  puts  into  them  is  that  which  is  in 
himself,  the  breath  of  his  own  vitality.  So 
strong  is  the  impression  which  he  thus  produces 
that  critics  like  Dr.  Brandes  have  believed  it 
possible  to  trace  in  his  works  not  only  the  move- 
ment of  his  spirit,  but  the  actual  footprints  of 
his  external  life.  Others,  finding  always  in  his 
characters  exactly  what  they  find  in  the  charac- 
ters of  the  world  around  them,  imagine  that 
there  must  have  been  over  and  above  all  these,  a 
Shakespeare  of  whose  character  no  record  is 
left,  a  Shakespeare  who  succeeded  in  concealing 
himself.  But  Shakespeare's  ingenuous  concen- 
tration is  the  reverse  of  an  attempt  at  conceal- 
ment; it  is  the  negation  of  a  pose,  a  self-disguise, 
an  adopted  point  of  view.  If  he  had  a  wider 
and  more  comprehensive  vision  of  human  life 
than  Byron  or  other  poets.  If  he  treated  it  more 
tolerantly  and  was  more  completely  absorbed  in 
the  study  of  it,  that  is  only  to  say  that  he  had  a 
different  and  more  intense  personality." 


46 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 


•      XIII 

Professor  Kittredge  draws  a  lively  sketch  of 
King  Claudius  — '  who  has  fared  hard  at  the 
hands  of  the  moralising  critics  and  the  actors  ' 
—  superbly  regal,  confronting  an  armed  mob 
with  serene  disdain,  silencing  the  rash  and  dan- 
gerous Laertes  with  a  glance,  sympathizing  with 
Ophelia,  divided  from  herself  and  her  fair  rea- 
son, '  without  the  which  we  are  pictures  or  mere 
brutes  ' ;  '  the  same  Claudius  who  could  not  pray 
because  his  Intellect  was  so  pitilessly  honest  that 
self-deceit  was  beyond  his  power;  the  same 
Claudius  who  faced  his  own  damnation,  know- 
ing he  was  the  son  of  wrath  because  he  could  not 
give  up  his  crown  or  his  queen,  and  was  too  sub- 
lime to  juggle  with  his  conscience.'  The  pro- 
fessor draws  a  lively  sketch  of  King  Claudius, 
and  then  jeers  at  those  who  see,  or  say  they  see, 
something  of  the  creator  in  such  a  creation. 
And  yet  we  know  the  professor  could  not  have 
painted  the  portrait  of  the  king.  There  is,  for 
one  thing,  too  much  of  the  schoolma'am  about 
him,  Shakespeare  was  not  a  Pharisee;  he  was 
tolerant  of  humanity;  he  lavished  the  best  of  his 
art  upon  Dame  Quickly : — 

Tilly-fally,  Sir  John,  ne'er  tell  me;  your  ancient 
swaggerer  comes  not  in   my  doors.     I  was  before 

47 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

Master  Tisick,  the  debuty,  t'other  day;  and,  as  he 
said  to  me,  'twas  no  longer  ago  than  Wednesday  last, 
'  r  good  faith,  neighbour  Quickly,'  says  he;  Master 
Dumbe,  our  minister,  was  by  then ;  '  neighbour 
Quickly,'  says  he,  '  receive  those  that  are  civil ;  for,' 
said  he,  '  you  are  in  an  ill  name! '  Now  a'  said  so, 
I  can  tell  whereupon ;  '  for,'  says  he,  '  you  are  an 
honest  woman,  and  well  thought  on ;  therefore  take 
heed  what  guests  you  receive;  receive,'  says  he,  'no 
swaggering  companions.'  There  comes  none  here; 
you  would  bless  you  to  hear  what  he  said;  no,  I'll 
no  swaggerers. 

He  put  into  the  mouth  of  Pistol  as  vaunting  a 
phrase  as  man  ever  uttered: — 

Why,  then  the  world's  mine  oyster, 
Which  I  with  sword  will  open. 

The  natural  tendency  of  his  youth  had  been  to 
see  good  everywhere,  even  (perhaps)  in  Claud- 
ius. He  felt,  with  his  King  Henry,  that  '  there 
is  some  soul  of  goodness  in  things  evil.'  But  as 
he  matured  the  misery  of  life  presented  itself  be- 
fore him  in  all  the  abject  awfulness  of  its  real- 
ity; it  seemed  to  appal  him.  There  was  the 
social  problem,  the  problem  of  what  one  should 
do,  must  do  for  one's  neighbour;  it  seemed  to 
weigh  upon  his  heart: — 

Poor  naked  wretches,  wheresoe'er  you  are, 
That  bide  the  pelting  of  this  pitiless  storm, 
48 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

How  shall  your  houseless  heads  and  unfed  sides, 
Your  loop'd  and  window'd  raggedness,  defend  you 
From  seasons  such  as  these? 

The  later  Shakespeare  could  not  jest  concerning 
the  weakness,  the  folly,  the  sin  of  another  as 
lightly  as  did  the  young  man  new  come  to  town. 
It  was  especially  the  potency  of  evil  that  im- 
pressed him ;  the  selfishness,  be  it  ever  so  regal, 
which  brought  so  much  woe  into  the  world.  It 
was  on  compulsion,  because  my  Lord  Chamber- 
lain's company  was  running  behind  Henslowe's, 
—  Henslowe  who  did  not  risk  public  favour 
with  Hamlet  and  Julius  Csesar, —  that  he  made 
of  Measure  for  Measure  a  comedy,  but  he  him- 
self did  not  laugh.  Victorien  Sardou  wrote  a 
tragedy.  La  Tosca,  upon  the  same  theme. 
It  was,  as  Dr.  Brandes  has  pointed  out,  clearly 
his  indignation  at  the  growing  Pharisaism  in 
matters  pertaining  to  sexual  morality  that  at- 
tracted Shakespeare  to  so  unpleasant  a  parable. 
He  was  in  earnest,  however;  though  the  pit 
rocked  with  laughter,  he  was  as  earnest  as  is 
Mr.  Shaw,  and  surely  only  a  fool  will  deny  the 
purpose  in  the  latter's  plays.  What  fascinated 
Shakespeare  in  Hamlet,  though  more  partic- 
ularly in  Macbeth  and  Othello,  was  to 
show  how  evil,  having  injected  some  of  its 
poison  into  a  man's  veins,  slowly  infects  the 
whole  man.  We  see  him,  with  most  of  the  illu- 
49 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

sions  of  his  youth  gone,  brooding  over  this  sub- 
ject in  the  later  tragedies.  He  had,  of  course, 
recognised  it  earher;  in  Richard  the  Third, 
for  instance,  but  Richard  is  the  same  man  from 
beginning  to  end.  Macbeth  is  a  study  in  moral 
degradation;  lago  is  a  villain  without  a  peer  in 
literature  —  he  even  deceives  us  to-day  and  we 
know  him  for  what  he  is,  the  man  who  sold  his 
friend  for  his  own  advancement. 

Claudius  —  of  course,  it  fares  hard  with  him 
at  the  hands  of  the  moralists  as  it  fared  hard 
with  him  in  life,  or  rather,  at  Shakespeare's 
hands;  but  he  is  a  secondary  character,  scarce  a 
study  in  progressive  depravity.  Only  a  profes- 
sor, with  all  the  lovely  heroines  to  choose  from, 
would  take  him  as  a  text  on  which  to  preach  con- 
cerning Shakespeare.  He  is,  of  course,  fin- 
ished, detailed,  a  wonderful  characterisation; 
this  goes  without  saying,  since  he  is  Shakes- 
peare's; but  when  the  curtain  rises  he  is  already 
the  rottenest  thing  in  Denmark,  and  when  he 
dies,  he  dies  unrepentant,  the  fool  of  his  lust, 
foredoomed  to  disaster.  He  may  have  had  a 
good  angel  about  him,  but,  as  Falstaff  said  of 
his  page,  '  the  devil  outbid  him.' 

The  professor  defends  Claudius  against  his 
traducers.  This  is  very  noble  and  very  unneces- 
sary. But  when  he  says  that  because  we  cannot 
identify  Shakespeare  with  Claudius,  we  cannot 

50 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

see  anything  of  Shakespeare  in  Claudius  he  is 
...  I  have  a  friend,  a  very  literary  friend,  who 
once  triumphantly  pointed  out  to  me  that  there 
was  a  world  of  difference  between  Jack  Tanner, 
pursued  and  married  apparently  somewhat 
against  his  will  by  the  wholly  delightful,  quite 
irresistible  Ann,  and  his  creator  Mr.  Shaw, 
since  the  latter  managed  to  remain  a  bachelor 
until  long  after  his  fortieth  year.  One  might  as 
well  argue  that  we  who  have  only  read  Miss 
Julia  know  nothing  of  Strindberg  simply  because 
we  have  not  shared  his  bed  and  board.  The  ex- 
ternals of  life,  the  physical  adventures  of  exist- 
ence are,  in  large  part,  accidental,  quite  beyond 
our  control;  the  adventures  of  one's  mind  are  a 
true  index  to  one's  character,  and  they  vary  as 
we  vary;  they  make  us  what  we  are.  'Tis  a 
trite  aphorism,  but  true  enough  for  my  purpose: 
A  man  is  as  he  thinks.  And,  as  I  have  said,  we 
know  what  Shakespeare  thought. 

Bobby  Burns  was  a  poet,  not  a  ploughboy;  he 
would  still  have  been  a  poet  had  he  been  born  in 
Boston  and  educated  at  Harvard  under  Profes- 
sor Kittredge. 

XIV 

The  professor  insists  that  we  '  can  never 
read  the  riddle  of  another's  personahty,'  can 

51 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

never  understand  our  fellows,  but  must  live  on, 
isolated,  only  by  the  merest  chance  and  in  the 
commonest  affairs  of  life  sympathising  with  our 
friends.  All  art  is  a  refutation  of  any  such 
statement.  What  is  Hamlet  but  just  such 
an  interpretation  of  another  as  he  deems  im- 
possible? Does  not  Falstaff,  with  his  page  at 
his  heels,  walk  before  us  for  all  the  world  '  like 
a  sow  that  hath  overwhelmed  all  her  litter  but 
one?'  Is  he  not  a  living  creature,  almost  as 
immortal  as  the  gods,  as  real  as  you  or  I  ?  Can 
we  not  hear  the  tones  of  Harry  Percy's  voice,  or 
the  laughter  of  Jaques  in  the  forest  of  Arden? 
And  what  is  criticism  '  but  a  reading  of  the 
riddle  of  another's  personality'?  'Tis  no 
'  idle  revery,'  as  the  professor  would  have  us 
believe,  '  dignified  with  the  name  of  biographic 
fact'  Biography  has  nothing  whatever  to  do 
with  it.  Boswell  understood  Johnson,  and  his 
understanding  took  no  account  of  the  accidents 
of  time  and  place.  Shakespeare  understood 
Antony  and  as  he  sat  at  his  table  writing  again 
the  tale  of  the  huge  proconsul's  love  for  Cleo- 
patra, he  lived  over  in  his  mind  the  years  of  his 
own  life  when  such  another  as  the  imperial 
gypsy  of  the  Nile  held  him  in  thrall,  the  willing 
slave  of  her  caprice.  Why  should  the  profes- 
sor wish  to  dispense  with  all  that  has  been  read 
between  the  lines  of  Shakespeare's  plays?     I 

52 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

grant  you  he  does  not  understand  Shakespeare, 
but  why  should  he  mock  at  those  who  do?  Or 
set  himself  up  against  the  saner  of  the  critics  to 
overthrow  their  discoveries  with  a  careless  wave 
of  the  hand?  'Of  all  methods  and  ideals  in 
the  study  of  Shakespeare's  dramas,  the  most 
desperately  wrong  is  that  which  seeks,  exclu- 
sively or  principally,  to  discover  the  man  in  his 
works.'  And  to  prove  it,  he  proves  that 
Shakespeare  is  not  Claudius  or  lago  or  Lear  or 
Rosalind. 

But  he  fears  we  may  think  him  '  malicious  ' 
in  his  selection  of  Claudius  and  lago  and  the  rest 
as  '  representative  '  of  Shakespeare,  and  to 
repel  any  such  insinuation  puts  forward  Pistol. 
He  quotes  what  he  considers  '  an  outrageous 
example  of  frantic  Pistolese  ' :  — 

Shall  pack-horses 
And  hollow  pamper'd  jades  of  Asia, 
Which  cannot  go  but  thirty  mile  a  day, 
Compare  with  Caesars  and  with  Cannibals, 
And  Trojan  Greeks?     Nay,  rather  damn  them  with 
King  Cerberus  —  and  let  the  welkin  ring ! 
Shall  we  fall  foul  for  toys? 

Here,  according  to  the  Professor,  we  have 
'the  real  Shakespeare,'  ('who  loved  words 
for  their  sound,  and  not  for  their  sense  alone  — 
otherwise  he  could  not  have  been  a  poet ') ,  '  lux- 

53 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

uriating  in  pure  prodigality  of  vocal  reverbera- 
tion—  borrowing  Gargantua's  mouth  —  angli- 
cising honorilicabilitudinitalibus.'  And  then, 
some  more  of  his  Latin  —  haec  fabula  docet 
and  hie  et  ubique  —  and  he  asks :  '  Have  I  not 
proved  my  point? ' 

We  are  such  stuff 
As  dreams  are  made  on ;  and  our  little  life 
Is  rounded  with  a  sleep. 

The  words  are  simple,  common,  such  as  a 
child  might  use,  such  as  Shakespeare  loved.  In 
Synge's  plays,  as  Mr.  C.  E.  Montague  has  re- 
marked, the  English  of  the  Elizabethans  seems 
to  have  come  back  to  us  from  Ireland  almost  as 
fresh  as  it  was  when  the  Elizabethan  settlers  left 
It  there;  it  is  the  English  of  the  King  James' 
Version,  straightforward,  lithe  and  clean  — 
'  Isn't  it  a  pitiful  thing  when  there's  nothing  left 
of  a  man  who  was  a  great  rower  and  fisher  but 
a  bit  of  an  old  shirt  and  a  plain  stocking?  '  and, 
again,  when  the  mother  whose  six  sons  are  dead, 
says:  '  It's  a  great  rest  I'll  have  now,  and  it's 
time  surely ' ;  and  '  I  won't  care  what  way  the 
sea  is  when  the  other  women  will  be  keening.' 
Keats  was  haunted  day  and  night  by  Edgar's 
question:  'Hark!  canst  thou  not  hear  the 
sea  ?  '  '  Beauty  like  sorrow  dwelleth  every- 
where,' is  as  fine  as  anything  in  Ben  Jonson. 

54 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

There  is  but  one  greatly  poetic  phrase  in  Stephen 
Phillips'  Poems,  (The  Woman  with  the  Dead 
Soul,  etc.),  where  Lazarus  rising  from  the  dead 
hears  how  '  the  sea  murmured  again  ' ;  there  is 
little  in  tragedy  more  beautiful  than  Giovanni's 
line  '  I  did  not  know  the  dead  could  have  such 
hair.'  Is  it  the  thought  or  the  sound  that 
makes  these  words  memorable? 

The  professor  should  read  Hazlltt's  essay, 
in  Table  Talk,  on  Familiar  Style;  I  quote  from 
a  note  in  the  first  edition:  '  I  have  heard  of 
such  a  thing  as  an  author,  who  makes  it  a  rule 
never  to  admit  a  monosyllable  into  his  vapid 
verse.  Yet  the  charm  and  sweetness  of  Mar- 
low's  lines  depended  often  on  their  being  made 
up  almost  entirely  of  monosyllables.'  Hazlitt 
had  been  objecting  and  rightly  to  Dr.  John- 
son's style  because  there  was  no  discrimination, 
no  selection,  no  variety  in  it,  none  but  '  tall, 
opaque  words  '  taken  from  the  '  first  row  of 
the  rubric,' — words  with  the  greatest  num- 
ber of  syllables,  such  words  as  the  professor 
would  have  our  genuine  poets  employ  to  the 
virtual  exclusion  of  Mr.  Kipling's  virile  Anglo- 
Saxon,  to  the  practical  extinction  of  Mr.  Shaw's 
trenchant  and  simple  English.  '  If  a  fine  style 
depended  on  this  sort  of  arbitrary  pretension, 
it  would  be  fair  to  judge  of  an  author's  ele- 
gance by  the  measurement  of  his  words,  and 

5S 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

the  substitution  of  foreign  circumlocutions 
(with  no  precise  associations)  for  the  mother- 
tongue.'  Hazlitt  was  eminently  sane.  '  The 
proper  force  of  words  lies  not  in  the  words 
themselves,  but  in  their  application.'  Though 
we  are,  according  to  R.  L.  S.,  '  mighty  fine  fel- 
lows ',  we  can  none  of  us  write  like  William 
Hazlitt;  that  we  are  'mighty  fine  fellows'  is, 
according  to  Henley,  a  '  Great  Perhaps,'  that 
we  can  none  of  us  write  like  Hazlitt  merely 
mdubitable.  The  professor  apparently  does 
not  agree  with  Hazlitt.  But  then,  why  should 
he?  There  are  two  sides  to  every  argument. 
Mr.  Cradock  of  Gumley,  a  friend  of  Johnson's 
—  '  of  all  the  men  I  ever  knew  Dr.  Johnson 
was  the  most  instructive  '  —  tells  in  his  Me- 
moirs, which  were  printed  in  1826-28,  many 
amusing  anecdotes,  among  them  several  con- 
cerning Goldsmith.  It  is  from  him  that  we 
get  the  oft-repeated  lament:  'while  you  are 
nibbling  about  elegant  phrases,  I  am  obliged  to 
write  half  a  volume';  and  hear  first  of  Gold- 
smith's delightful  proposition  for  improving 
Gray's  Elegy  by  putting  out  '  an  idle  word  in 
every  line.'     As  thus :  — 

The  curfew  tolls  the  knell  of  day, 

The  lowing  herd  winds  o'er  the  lea, 

The  ploughman  homeward  plods  his  way, — 

S6 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

and  so  forth.  Lord  Lytton,  so  I  learn  from 
Mr.  Austin  Dobson,  in  an  excellent  article  in 
the  Edinburgh  Review,  ingeniously  exploded 
this  piece  of  profanation  by  shearing  down 
Shakespeare's  '  gaudy,  babbling,  and  remorse- 
less day,'  on  the  same  principle,  to  a  bare  '  the 
day.'  I  would  not  have  my  readers  think  all 
adjectives  superfluous;  some  men  are  fools  and 
dullards,  others  merely  malicious,  crying  out 
against  Nineveh  because  her  women  are  beau- 
tiful. 


XV 

The  professor  Is  most  unfortunate  in  his  quo- 
tation, but  still  more  so  in  his  comment.  The 
talk  of  the  braggart  Pistol,  (the  swaggerer  to 
whom  Dame  Quickly  objected),  is  an  anthology 
of  playhouse  bombast.  He  is  not  only  highly 
amusing  in  himself,  but  has  given  Shakespeare 
an  opportunity  to  gird  at  the  '  prodigality  of 
vocal  reverberation,'  the  robustious  style  of  the 
earlier  tragic  dramatists,  a  style  repulsive  to  his 
finer  poetic  sensibilities.  He  parodies  Mar- 
lowe's Tamburlaine  in  the  outburst  quoted  by 
Professor  Kittredge.  It  occurs  in  Henry 
IV,  Part  II,  Act  II,  4,  '  the  finest  tavern  scene 
ever  written,'  according  to  Mr.  Masefield,  an 
admitted  authority  on  such  scenes.     In  Tam- 

57 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

burlaine,  Second  Part,  Act  II,  4,  the  passage 
runs : — ■ 

Hallo,   ye  pamper'd  jades  of  Asia, 

What?     Can  ye  draw  but  twenty  miles  a  day? 

Further  on,  in  the  same  scene,  he  makes  fun  of 
George  Peele's  Turkish  Mahomet  and  Hyren, 
the  fair  Greek,  when  Pistol,  alluding  to  his 
sword,  exclaims,  'Have  we  not  Hyren  here?' 
And  again  it  is  Peele  who  is  aimed  at  when  Pis- 
tol says  to  the  hostess : — 

Then  feed  and  be  fat,  my  fair  Calipolis; 
Come  give's  some  sack, 

Si  fortune  me  tormente,  sperato  me  contento. 
Fear  we  broadsides  ?  no,  let  the  fiend  give  fire : 
Give  me  some  sack :  and,  sweetheart,  lie  out  there. 

[Layinff  his  sword  on  the  table] 
Come  we  to  full  points  here ;  and  are  etceteras  noth- 
ing? 

In  the  Battle  of  Alcazar,  Muley  Mahomet 
brings  his  wife  some  flesh  on  the  point  of  the 
sword  and  says  :  — 

Hold   thee,    Calipolis,    feed   and    faint   no   more! 

In  the  course  of  a  scholarly  essay  on  Dr. 
Johnson's  Writings,  Sir  Leslie  Stephen  says: 
"  '  The  style  is  the  man  '  is  a  very  excellent 
aphorism,  though  some  eminent  writers  have 
lately  pointed  out  that  Buffon's  original  remark 

58 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

was  '  le  style  c'est  de  rhomme.'  That  only 
proves  that,  like  many  other  good  sayings,  it 
has  been  polished  and  brought  to  perfection  by 
the  process  of  attrition  in  numerous  minds,  in- 
stead of  being  struck  out  at  a  blow  by  a  solitary 
thinker.  FVom  a  purely  logical  point  of  view, 
Buffon  may  be  correct:  but  the  very  essence  of 
an  aphorism  is  that  slight  exaggeration  which 
makes  it  more  biting  whilst  less  rigidly  accurate. 
According  to  Buffon,  the  style  might  belong  to  a 
man  as  an  acquisition  rather  than  as  a  natural 
growth,"  Boswell  has  somewhere  a  discussion 
as  to  the  writers  who  helped  to  form  Johnson's 
style,  whereas  Johnson,  like  all  other  men  of 
strong  individuality,  formed  his  style  as  he 
formed  his  legs  —  '  buffeting  with  his  books.' 
And  in  like  manner  the  style  of  William  Shakes- 
peare was  formed;  listening  to  the  brilliant  talk 
of  his  contemporaries,  reading  the  wonderful 
translations  then  being  issued  from  the  press. 
The  hopes,  the  aspirations,  the  romance  of  the 
age  took  seed  and  flowered  in  the  secret  places 
of  his  heart. 

And  nothing  is  so  evident  as  the  impression 
made  by  the  gorgeous  and  violent  rhetoric  of 
Marlowe  upon  the  mind  of  the  youthful  Shake- 
speare. Marlowe's  influence  is  unmistakable  in 
Titus  Andronicus  and  the  early  histories,  not 
only  In  the  style  and  versification,  but  in  the  lav- 
59 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

ish  effusion  of  blood  through  which  we  wade 
ankle-deep.  Shakespeare's  Aaron  and  Peek's 
barbarous  Muley  Mahomet  are  cousins,  the  off- 
spring of  the  Jew  of  Malta  and  his  henchman 
Ithamore.  It  is  probable  that  Shakespeare  was 
later  somewhat  ashamed  of  his  spring  madness 
and  took  an  early  opportunity  of  ridiculing  the 
traducers  of  his  youth. 

And  the  professor?  To  paraphrase  Henley, 
we  have  all  of  us  listened  long  enough  to  the 
professor  on  Shakespeare;  the  everlasting  pity 
of  it  is  that  we  shall  never  listen  to  Shakespeare 
on  the  professor.  He  (the  professor)  must 
think  of  personality  as  of  something  about  as  in- 
tangible as  oil-cloth,  and  of  poetry  as  words 
'  full  of  sound  and  fury  signifying  nothing.' 

XVI 

There  has  been  born  into  this  world  but  one 
man  capable,  had  he  lived  to  maturity,  of  oust- 
ing William  Shakespeare  from  his  place  upon 
the  heights;  and  that  man  was  Christopher  Mar- 
lowe, the  son  of  a  cobbler  in  Canterbury.  He 
was  a  foundation  scholar  at  the  King's  School 
in  his  native  town;  matriculated  at  Cambridge  in 
1580;  took  the  degree  of  B.A.  In  1583,  and  of 
M.A.  at  the  age  of  twenty-three  after  he  had 
left  the  University.     He  appeared  in  London 

60 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

(so  we  gather  from  an  old  ballad)  as  an  actor 
at  the  Curtain  Theatre,  but  had  the  misfortune 
to  break  his  leg  upon  the  stage,  and  was,  no 
doubt  on  this  account,  compelled  to  give  up 
acting.  His  first  dramatic  work,  Tamburlaine 
the  Great,  seems  to  have  been  written,  at  latest, 
in  1587.  He  has  a  special  claim  upon  our 
affections ;  he  belongs  to  the  glorious  company  of 
those  who  have  died  young  —  Chatterton, 
Keats,  Shelley,  Byron,  Dowson,  Rupert  Brooke, 
Alan  Seeger  and  Richard  Hovey,  our  own 
Hovey,  as  Seeger  is  ours  for  all  that  he  died 
fighting  for  France.  We  may  well  believe  Mr. 
Bliss  Carman  when  he  tells  us  : 

Oh,  but  life  went  gaily,  gaily, 
In    the    house    of    Idiedaily. 

And  it  went  gaily  with  young  Marlowe,  for 
he  was  a  son  of  the  morning.  As  Lowell  has 
said,  '  he  brought  the  English  unrhymed  penta- 
meter (which  had  hitherto  justified  but  half  its 
name  by  being  always  blank  and  never  verse)  to 
a  perfection  of  melody,  harmony,  and  variety 
which  has  never  been  surpassed.'  He  was  a 
titan  struggling  magnificently  against  old  gods 
and  outworn  superstititons,  such  another  as 
Prince  Lucifer,  the  Lord  of  Light;  and  standing 
on  the  summits  of  Parnassus,  he  casts  a  shadow 
across  the  after-ages  which  only  the  sun  of 
61 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

Shakespeare  can  lighten.  It  would  be  impos- 
sible to  overestimate  his  value  as  a  leader  and 
pioneer  in  Enghsh  poetry.  Algernon  Charles 
Swinburne,  himself  a  poet,  and  one  of  the  ablest 
of  the  many  critics  who  have  written  concerning 
the  art  and  culture  of  the  Elizabethan  era,  says, 
in  his  article  in  the  Encyclopoedia  Brittanica: 
"  To  no  other  poet  have  so  many  of  the  greatest 
among  poets  been  so  directly  indebted;  nor  was 
any  great  writer's  influence  upon  his  fellows 
more  utterly  and  unmixedly  an  influence  for 
good.  He  first,  and  he  alone,  guided  Shake- 
speare In  the  right  way  of  work;  his  music  in 
which  there  is  no  echo  of  any  man's  before  him, 
found  its  own  echo  in  the  more  prolonged  but 
hardly  more  exalted  harmony  of  Milton.  He 
is  the  greatest  discoverer,  the  most  daring  and 
inspired  leader,  in  all  our  poetic  literature.  Be- 
fore him  there  was  neither  a  genuine  blank  verse 
nor  a  genuine  tragedy  in  our  language.  After 
his  arrival  the  way  was  prepared,  the  paths  were 
made  straight  for  Shakespeare." 

And  Marlowe  was  Shakespeare's  senior  by  a 
scant  three  months.  He  died  in  the  twenty- 
ninth  year  of  his  youth,  beloved  by  all  the  gods 
on  high  Olympus,  mourned  for  centuries  in 
every  land  where  European  culture  is  known  or 
spoken  of.  He  was  stabbed,  so  tradition  has  it, 
in  the  eye  with  his  own  dagger,  wrenched  from 

62 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

his  hand  by  a  certain  Francis  Archer,  his  rival 
in  amour;  they  had  quarrelled  over  a  serving- 
maid. 

XVII 

Mr.  Shaw,  however,  confidently  asserts  that 
had  he  been  born  in  1556   (thereby  antedating 
Marlowe  by  eight  years)   instead  of  1856,  he 
would   have   talven   to   blank  verse   and   given 
Shalcespeare  a  harder  run  for  his  money  than  all 
the  other  Elizabethans  put  together;  Mr.  Shaw 
who  is  about  as  daring  as  the  humour  of  Punch, 
whose  affair  with  Melpomene  was  broken  off  on 
account   of  his   friendship   for   Mrs.   Warren. 
Mr.  Shaw  is  a  writer  of  prose  as  witness  the 
speeches  he  has  put  into  the  mouth  of  his  young 
poet   Marchbanks   in   Candida.     I   am  always 
amused  by  Mr.  Shaw's  efforts  of  serious  intent, 
his  wild  raging  before  the  gods  we  others  have 
erected  in  the  temples  of  Apollo,  the  gods  we  re- 
fuse to  remove  or  replace  with  such  common- 
place images  as  he  deems  lovely,  usually  some 
practical  variant  of  the  golden  calf.     I  am  by 
no  means  ashamed  of  being  accused  of  a  lack  of 
humour.     God  wot,  there  is  no  lack  of  it  in  this 
world  where  thousands  jest  daily  in  the  face  of 
almost   certain   destruction.      I    shall   interpret 
Mr.  Shaw's  arrogant  self-praise  literally.     It  is 
of  the  essence  of  Shaw  and  his  middle-class  — 

63 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

nothing  is  so  middle-class  as  the  constant  as- 
sumption of  superiority  —  his  middle-class  atti- 
tude towards  all  that  is  inspiring  and  beautiful 
in  human  history.  He  scoffs  at  '  gentle  Jesus, 
meek  and  mild,'  (while  Miss  Rebecca  West 
hails  him  'a  spiritual  teacher'),  as  'a  sniv- 
elling modern  invention,  with  no  warrant  in  the 
gospels.'  Whereas,  as  Mr.  Frank  Harris  has 
pointed  out,  it  was  Jesus  who  first  in  all  the 
world  advised  us  to  turn  the  other  cheek,  and  to 
give  the  cloak  to  the  robber  who  had  taken  the 
coat.  Does  he  not  teach  us  to  do  good  to  our 
enemies?  How  does  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount 
begin?  '  Blessed  are  the  poor  in  spirit.'  We 
cannot  mistake  his  meaning;  he  strikes  the  same 
note  again :  '  Blessed  are  the  meek,  for  they 
shall  inherit  the  earth.'  As  a  pioneer,  a  leader 
in  the  vanguard  of  thought,  Mr.  Shaw  takes 
rank,  not  with  Marlowe,  but  with  the  man  who 
discovers  a  skeleton  in  his  closet,  writes  a  thesis 
on  the  subject,  and  hopes  to  deliver  a  lecture  at 
the  Bodleian,  thereby  adding  to  our  knowledge 
of  anthropology.  What  Mr.  Shaw,  in  all  prob- 
ability, could  have  done  in  Elizabethan  England, 
he  has  done  in  the  England  of  to-day:  satirised 
the  fads  and  the  follies  of  the  butcher,  the  baker, 
the  candlestickmaker,  and  worked  himself  up 
into  something  of  a  passion  over  the  '  Idolatry  ' 
of  Shakespeare's  admirers.     He  has  taken  his 

64 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

cue  from  his  master  Ben  Jonson.  They  are  as 
like  as  an  Enghshman  and  an  Irishman  well  can 
be,  and  still  retain  some  traces  of  their  national- 
ity. Jonson  had  an  idea  that  he  could  rail 
the  public  into  approbation;  Mr.  Shaw  —  well, 
the  Poetaster  reappears  generations  later  as 
Fanny's  First  Play.  Jonson  wrote  very 
learnedly  of  the  use  of  cosmetics  during  the 
reign  of  the  Roman  Tiberius;  Mr.  Shaw  quotes 
long  paragraphs  to  uphold  his  references  to  Cle- 
opatra's cure  for  baldness.  Both  depict  Caesar 
with  a  sense  of  humour:  Mr.  Shaw's  Caesar 
and  Cleopatra,  and  the  tragedy  of  Catiline, 
Act  V,  6,  where  Csesar  hands  over  to  Cato  (who 
has  openly  accused  him  of  receiving  secret  mes- 
sages from  the  conspirators,  even  in  the  Senate) 
the  letter  containing  declarations  of  love  not 
from  Catiline,  but  from  Servilia,  Cato's  sister. 
Thereby  they  (Mr.  Shaw  and  Ben  Jonson) 
differ  radically  from  Shakespeare,  whose  Caesar 
is  as  serious  and  pompous  as  a  midwest  con- 
gressman. Mr'.  Shaw  is  by  all  odds  the  most 
interesting,  perhaps  the  finest  figure  in  England 
to-day;  but  his  knowledge  of  sociology  is  no 
more  original  or  startling  than  was  Jonson's 
knowledge  of  the  classics.  Indeed  there  is,  as 
I  have  hinted,  a  strange  analogy  between  the 
two.  Neither  one  has  kept  to  the  high  level  of 
his  earliest  achievements;  Jonson's  work  no- 
6S 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

ticeably  deteriorated  after  Bartholomew  Fair, 
Mr.  Shaw  has  failed  to  live  up  to  the  fine 
promise  of  Candida  or  Man  and  Superman. 


XVIII 

Professor  Dowden  has  somewhere  said  that 
had  Shakespeare  died  at  forty,  the  world  might 
have  mourned  his  loss,  but  would  certainly  have 
been  consoled  in  the  thought  that  he  had 
reached  his  zenith;  no  man  could  surpass  Ham- 
let —  and  then,  in  rapid  succession,  followed 
Pvlacbeth,  Othello,  King  Lear,  Cymbeline, 
A  Winter's  Tale,  The  Tempest.  Neverthe- 
less Mr.  Shaw  is  convinced  that  Shakespeare 
was  very  like  himself.  This  is  reducing 
Shakespeare  to  an  absurdity.  Is  it  always 
In  terms  of  Mr.  Shaw  that  the  men  and 
women  of  this  world  are  to  be  judged?  Be- 
cause he  cannot  coin  words  but  must  resort  to 
tablets  and  notebooks  in  order  that  he  may  treas- 
ure up  for  future  use  the  chance  phrases  dropped 
by  the  careless  folk  with  whom  he  brushes  el- 
bows, is  Shakespeare  to  be  depicted  upon  the 
stage  as  a  '  mere  snapper-up  of  inconsidered 
trifles '  ?  Mr.  Shaw  himself  expressly  states 
that  Shakespeare  was  not  Autolycus.  Why 
then  this  Jonsonian  wail  against  the  age  into 

66 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

which  he  was  born,  the  posterity  that  can  never 
hope  to  understand  either  Shakespeare  or  him- 
self? Is  it  not  a  disparagement  of  Shakes- 
peare's genius  to  place  him  in  company  with  a 
common  Beefeater,  and  then  put  into  the  mouth 
of  the  latter  the  more  exquisite  phrases,  to  por- 
tray Shakespeare  hanging  upon  the  words  of  a 
warder?  Does  Mr.  Shaw  know  nothing  of 
Elizabethan  England?  Is  it  possible  that  he 
has  not  heard  of  the  extent  of  Shakespeare's 
vocabulary?  An  Italian  opera  libretto  contains 
at  most  eight  hundred  words;  a  well  educated 
Englishman  will  rarely  use  more  than  three  or 
four  thousand;  there  are  but  fifty-six  hundred 
and  forty-two  in  the  Old  Testament;  whereas 
Shakespeare  employed  more  than  fifteen  thou- 
sand words  in  his  poems  and  plays  alone.  He 
lived  in  an  age  of  expansion  and  splendour,  an 
age  of  high  lights  and  total  eclipse;  life  was  a 
great  adventure  then;  men  sailed  away  across 
uncharted  seas  toward  unknown  coasts  and  re- 
turned, if  at  all,  rich  beyond  the  dreams  of  a 
school-girl.  We  to-day,  to  quote  Lowell  again, 
cannot  read  Hakluyt's  voyages  (much  less 
Henry  IV)  without  amazement  to  find  com- 
mon sailors  habitually  using  a  diction  that  rises 
at  times,  as  they  tell  of  their  wanderings,  to  well- 
nigh  Homeric  beauty  and  power.  The  F'nglish 
language  has  deteriorated  and  Mr.  Shaw  is  at  a 

67 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

disadvantage;  he  needs  must  write  while  Eng- 
land, at  a  loss  for  words,  raving  in  Billingsgate, 
fights  for  air.  There  are  no  more  Raleighs. 
Lloyd-George  is  as  unheroic  as  the  Wales  from 
which  he  hails.  There  is  a  gap  between  the 
speech  of  books  and  that  of  life.  Walter  Pater 
laid  himself  open  to  the  charge  of  writing  Eng- 
lish as  though  it  had  been  a  dead  language;  and 
indeed,  so  far  as  poetry  is  concerned,  it  is  almost 
as  dead  as  Latin.  How  then  should  Mr.  Shaw, 
a  satirist  without  a  peer,  without  a  fairyland, 
who  vows  he  can  see  nothing  in  the  heavens  at 
night  save  '  stars  higgledy-piggledy  every  which 
way,'  who  refers  to  Fletcher  as  '  a  facile  blank 
verse  penny-a-liner,'  a  puritan  bordering  upon 
old  maidishness,  how  should  Mr.  Shaw  hope  to 
speak  for  Shakespeare?  He  cannot  recreate 
the  past  save  in  his  own  image,  how  then  should 
he  summon  from  the  grave  the  recreant  soul  of 
a  dreamer  and  bid  him  walk  as  in  the  flesh  be- 
fore the  wondering  eyes  of  man  —  man  so 
prone  to  believe  in  resurrected  ghosts?  There 
is  but  one  Shakespearean  touch  in  the  whole 
affair,  preface  and  play,  and  that  is  the  taking 
over  wholesale  by  Mr.  Shaw  of  another's  situa- 
tion. But  what  a  situation!  Shakespeare, 
who  cared  no  more  for  the  queen  than  I  do, 
madly  protesting  love  for  her,  utterly  oblivious 
of  the  livery  that  in  reality  weighed  upon  his 

68 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

shoulders  as  heavy  as  did  the  albatross  about 
the  neck  of  the  Mariner;  the  livery  which  he,  at 
the  first  plausible  opportunity,  threw  off,  pre- 
ferring provincial  trade  and  life  with  a  woman 
eight  years  his  senior,  eight  thousand  years  his 
mental  inferior,  to  all  the  plaudits  of  the  pit 
gained  under  license  such  as  is  to-day  allowed  a 
dog. 

XIX 

I  have  said  elsewhere  that  I  believe  William 
Herbert  —  the  Earl  of  Pembroke,  to  whom  the 
First  Folio  Edition  of  Shakespeare's  plays  was 
dedicated  by  the  editors  Heminges  (the  reputed 
creator  of  the  role  of  Falstaff)  and  Condell,  life- 
long friends  of  Shakespeare  and  members  with 
him  of  the  Lord  Chamberlain's  company  of 
players  —  to  have  been  the  Mr.  W.  H.  of  the 
Dedication,  the  Mr.  W.  H.  whom  Thomas 
Thorpe,  the  publisher,  describes  as  '  the  only 
begetter  of  these  insuing  sonnets,'  and  to  whom 
the  major  portion  of  the  Sonnets  was  ad- 
dressed. It  is  only  right  that  I,  who  have  been 
so  bold  in  my  arraignment  of  others,  should  give 
some  reason  for  so  believing,  though  there  be 
reason  enough  in  all  conscience  without  further 
debate  on  my  part.  Let  me  go  back  to  the  be- 
ginning and  quote  Mr.  Havelock  Ellis,  to  some 
69 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

extent  my  literary  godfather  and,  as  such,  stand- 
ing sponsor  for  no  end  of  my  literary  sins  —  as 
Bobby  Service  has  it,  '  the  other  kind  don't  mat- 
ter,' though  I  have  a  character  somewhat  re- 
sembling Mr.  Shaw's  in  that  it  needs  a  good 
deal  of  looking  after. 

In  that  sanest  and  best  of  all  of  to-day's 
books.  Affirmations,  in  the  book  of  which  I 
make  quite  as  good  use  as  many  another  man 
doth  of  '  a  death's  head  or  a  memento  mori,' 
Mr.  Havelock  Ellis  remarks,  inter  al:  "  In 
literature,  as  elsewhere,  art  should  only  be  ap- 
proached as  we  would  approach  Paradise,  for 
the  sake  of  its  joy.  It  would  be  well,  indeed,  if 
we  could  destroy  or  forget  all  that  has  ever  been 
written  about  the  world's  great  books,  even  if  it 
were  once  worth  while  to  write  those  books 
about  books.  How  happy,  for  instance,  the 
world  might  be  if  there  were  no  literature  about 
the  Bible,  if  Augustine  and  Aquinas  and  Calvin 
and  thousands  of  smaller  men  had  not  danced  on 
it  so  long,  stamping  every  page  of  it  into  mire, 
that  now  the  vision  of  a  single  line,  in  its  simple 
sense,  is  almost  an  effort  of  inspiration."  How 
happy  the  world  if  every  man  might  judge  of 
Shakespeare  for  himself  as  he  would  of  a  friend, 
his  mind  unbefogged  by  the  casual  comments  of 
some  high-school  Instructor  concerning  Hamlet, 
Othello,  Lear  or  the  man  himself.     Mr.  Gouv- 

70 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

erneur  Morris  knows  Conrad  and  says  of  those 
who  are  now  engaged  In  reading  him  for  the  first 
time  —  '  Oh,  how  I  envy  them !  '  But  we  can- 
not read  Shakespeare  for  the  first  time;  he  has 
already  been  read  to  us  when  we  were  far  too 
young  to  understand.  He  has  become  as  much 
a  part  of  our  civilisation  as  is  the  sun;  all  the 
novelty  has  been  worn  from  his  lines  by  the  fin- 
gering of  an  almost  endless  line  of  annotators; 
the  beauty  of  his  verse  is  lost  amid  the  droning 
voices  of  his  interpreters.  And  yet  sometimes, 
as  we  turn  the  pages  of  his  books,  the  splendour 
of  his  humanity  seems  to  dawn  upon  us  anew; 
and  what  an  adventure  it  is  to  come  upon  his 
lines  thus  suddenly,  as  though  for  the  first  time  1 
Those  are  red-letter  days  indeed,  ushered  In  by 
music  such  as  the  seraphs  use.  "  All  my  life 
long,"  continues  Mr.  Ellis,  "  I  have  been  casting 
away  the  knowledge  I  have  gained  from  books 
about  literature,  and  from  opinions  about  life, 
and  coming  to  literature  itself  or  to  life  itself,  a 
slow  and  painful  progress  towards  that  Heaven 
of  knowledge  where  a  child  is  king." 


XX 

I  am  a  farmer  in  Southern  Maryland,  and 
have  been  lucky  in  that  I  have  been  unable  to 
71 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

read  the  books  about  literature  to  which  Mr. 
Ellis  refers,  have  been  unable  to  listen  to  opin- 
ions concerning  life;  I  have  had  little  leisure.  I 
have  been  busy  with  life;  I  left  Cornell  in  my 
Freshman  year,  cooked  In  an  all-night  restaurant 
in  Klamath  Falls,  tended  sheep  camp,  herded 
horses,  rode  for  a  season  on  the  range  in  North- 
ern Montana  and  again  in  Eastern  Oregon,  laid 
pavement  for  the  Warren  Construction  Com- 
pany, surveyed  for  the  Government.  Until  a 
few  years  ago  when  I  happened  to  take  down 
from  among  my  books  Mr.  Shaw's  Dark  Lady 
of  the  Sonnets,  I  had  never  heard  of  the  contro- 
versy raging  around  the  impassive  figure  of  the 
sonneteer.  I  come  to  literature  and  to  life 
with  an  open  mind.  I  never  was  a  decadent.  I 
do  not  have  to  disabuse  my  brain  of  foregone 
conclusions.  I  have  not  spent  years  listening 
to  the  dry-as-dust  arguments  of  scholasticism 
concerning  a  poet  who  was  once  as  alive  as  Is 
Mr.  Cohan  to-day,  who  should  be  met  as  one 
goes  out  to  meet  a  distinguished  guest,  and  not 
relegated  to  the  laboratory  for  dissection  by  sci- 
entists. A  word  may  be  sufficient  for  the  wise 
—  perhaps  they  already  know  all  you  or  I  have 
to  tell.  Myself  I  am  still  young  and  eager  to 
learn.  So  I  read  Mr.  Shaw's  preface  and  fell 
In  love  with  Thomas  Tyler;  then  I  read  the  play 
and  fell  out  with  Mr.  Shaw.     So  I  reread  the 

72 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

preface.  I  came  to  where  he  quotes  the  one 
hundred  and  thirtieth  sonnet.  Imagine,  says 
Mr.  Shaw,  imagine  Mary  Fitton  reading  that  I 
And  I  tried  to  imagine  just  how  she  would  feel, 
—  with  what  success,  you  who  read  my  play  are 
best  able  to  say. 

But  I  was  interested  In  Mistress  Fitton  and  in 
Thomas  Tyler;  and  I  became  interested  in 
Shakespeare  entirely  apart  from  his  work  as  a 
dramatist,  interested  in  the  humdrum  everyday 
life  of  the  man  and  his  neighbours.  As  luck 
would  have  it,  I  studied  first  Mr.  William  Arch- 
er's edition  of  Dr.  Brandes'  William  Shake- 
speare; for  years  I  have  had  an  immense  admi- 
ration for  Dr.  Brandes.  Then  I  bought  more 
books  on  the  subject  than  I  could  well  afford — ■ 
I  had  to  write  a  play  to  recoup  my  fallen  for- 
tunes. I  have  bought  Sir  Sidney  Lee's  various 
volumes  on  the  Elizabethans;  I  have  bought 
practically  everything  I  could  lay  my  hands  on. 


XXI 

Sir  Sidney  Lee  has  written  a  life  of  Shake- 
speare; some  say  the  life  of  Shakespeare;  be 
that  as  it  may  Sir  Sidney  Lee  differs  radically 
from  Boswell  concerning  just  what  it  is  that  con- 
stitutes a  life.  For  us  (thanks  to  Boswell)  Jon- 
73 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

son  is  a  living,  thinking,  sentient  creature,  a  con- 
temporary; Sir  Sidney  Lee  cuts  Shakespeare  up 
into  a  mass  of  data,  speaks  of  him  as  I  might  of 
some  catalogue  in  the  British  Museum,  some 
mummy  dead  and  done  with  concerning  whom  a 
student  may  wax  erudite  without  fearing  contra- 
diction from  the  less  learned  average  of  human- 
ity. Sir  Sidney  Lee  refers  to  Marlowe  as  cas- 
ually as  Billy  Sunday  does  to  God,  and  with 
about  as  much  exactitude. —  You  remember  Mr. 
Kipling's  Tomlinson  who  patted  his  god  on  the 
head.  He  (Sir  Sidney  Lee)  doubts  the  Mann- 
ingham  Anecdote  which  I  quote  in  my  Dram- 
itis  Personae,  and  accepts  as  authentic  the  tradi- 
tion of  Marlowe's  violent  end;  there  is  as  much 
truth,  and  no  more,  in  the  one  account  as  in  the 
other.  "  Tamburlaine,  the  Jew  of  Malta,  Dr. 
Faustus  and  Edward  the  Second  were  among  the 
best  applauded  productions  through  the  year 
1594."  Why  the  year  1594,  the  year  following 
Marlowe's  death?  Why  not  'of  the  age'? 
Were  they  all  written  in  one  year?  Both  parts 
of  Tamburlaine  were  entered  in  the  Station- 
ers' Register  on  August  14,  1590;  the  first  part 
of  the  play  was  probably  produced  three  years 
before,  the  second  part  in  1588.  Dr.  Faustus 
was  acted  early  In  1589.  The  earliest  mention 
of  the  Jew  of  Malta  occurs  In  Henslowe's 
Diary,  where  a  performance  of  the  tragedy  is 

74 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

noted  as  taking  place  on  February  26,  1592; 
but  it  is  implied  that  the  play  was  not  then  new; 
its  composition  is  conjecturally  placed  about 
1590.  If  Sir  Sidney  Lee  is  going  to  stoop  to 
quibbhng  in  his  debates  on  the  vexed  subject  of 
the  Sonnets,  is  going  to  refer  to  Dr.  Brandes' 
WiUiam  Shakespeare  as  '  a  rather  fanciful 
study,'  he  should  himself  adhere  more  closely 
to  the  truth. 

XXII 

And  the  truth  is  Sir  Sidney  Lee  is  not  much  of 
a  critic.  He  is  a  patient  reader  of  old  docu- 
ments, a  careful  compiler  of  all  sorts  of  statis- 
tics, all  sorts  of  twice-told  tales;  but  if  you  really 
desire  to  meet  with  Shakespeare  turn  to  the 
Sonnets  or  the  plays,  and  not  to  Sir  Sidney 
Lee. 

For  instance,  he  does  not  believe  Lord  Wil- 
liam Herbert  to  have  been  the  Mr.  W.  H.  of  the 
Dedication  and  to  prove  it  (Thorpe's  edition  of 
the  Sonnets  is  dated  1609)  states  that  the  Earl 
of  Pembroke  was  spoken  of  as  Lord  Herbert 
in  1 60 1  and  referred  to  as  the  Earl  of  Pem- 
broke thereafter;  to  have  addressed  him  as 
'  Mr.'  would  have  been  a  star-chamber  offence. 
He  then  goes  on  to  prove  that  Thorpe  cared 
very  little  whether  he  offended  or  not.     It  has 

75 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

been  suggested  that  Ben  Jonson  referred  to 
Thorpe's  inscription  in  his  dedication  of  the 
Epigrams  to  the  Earl  of  Pembroke :  '  While 
you  cannot  change  your  merit,  I  dare  not 
change  your  title.  .  .  .  When  I  made  them  I 
had  nothing  in  my  conscience  to  expressing  of 
which  I  did  need  a  cipher;  '  implying  thereby 
that  some  one,  presumably  as  I  have  said  the 
reckless  Thorpe,  had  referred  in  some  similar 
dedication  to  the  Earl  of  Pembroke  as  other 
than  My  Lord,  or  as  plain  Mr.  W.  H.,  employ- 
ing a  cipher  —  initials  —  to  conceal  in  some 
sort  his  connection  with  an  unauthorized  edition 
of  another's  work,  i.e.  the  pirated  publication  of 
Shakespeare's  sonnets.  Jonson,  one  of  Shake- 
speare's intimates  and  a  friend  of  Pembroke's, 
naturally  knew  the  inside  story  of  this  transac- 
tion. William  Hall,  a  publisher,  who  '  flits  rap- 
idly across  the  stage  of  literary  history  '  was  '  in 
all  probability,'  according  to  Sir  Sidney  Lee, 
'  the  Mr.  W.  H.  of  Thorpe's  Dedication  of 
the  Sonnets,'  since  he  it  must  have  been  who 
procured  for  Thorpe  the  manuscript,  since  he 
was  a  personal  friend  of  Thorpe's, —  the  vari- 
ous volumes  they  published  issued  from  the  same 
press,  the  press  of  George  Eld,  a  printer  at  the 
White  Horse,  in  Fleet  Lane,  Old  Bailey,  Lon- 
don. Now  it  does  not  seem  to  me  that  this  is  a 
very  good  reason  for  believing  them  to  have 

76 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

been  fast  friends.  And  why  should  Hall,  who 
between  1609  and  16 14  published  some  twenty 
volumes,  turn  so  valuable  a  manuscript  as  that  of 
Shakespeare's  Sonnets  —  Shakespeare  was  very 
probably  even  then  spoken  of  as  the  most  Im- 
portant poet  of  the  day  —  over  to  Thorpe  who 
in  the  same  period  of  time  was  able  to  publish 
but  twelve  volumes?  And  they  would  seem  to 
have  had  but  little  In  common;  Hall  published 
nothing  but  sermons,  displays  of  heraldry,  theo- 
logical essays;  Thorpe  published  Marlowe's 
Lucan,  Jonson's  Volpone,  three  plays  by 
Chapman,  a  volume  on  Epictetus,  another  on  St. 
Augustine,  and  he  was  at  one  time  the  owner  of 
the  manuscript  of  Marlowe's  Hero  and  Lean- 
der.  Further  we  can  connect  him  directly  with 
the  Earl  of  Pembroke;  he  dedicated  two  vol- 
umes to  him  —  St.  Augustine  of  the  City  of 
God  .  .  .  Englished  by  I.  H.,  16 10,  and  a 
second  edition  of  Healey's  Epictetus,  1616. 
We  can  almost  connect  him  with  Shakespeare, 
through  Marlowe  whom  one  edited  and  the 
other  quoted,  through  the  Sonnets,  and  through 
Thorpe  having  dedicated  Epictetus  his  Manual 
to  Shakespeare's  intimate  friend  John  Florio. 
Sir  Sidney  Lee  speaks  of  Thorpe  as  though  he 
thought  of  him  as  one  might  of  some  half-fed 
vagabond;  he  seems  to  me  to  have  been  of  the 
tribe  of  Burns  — 'twas  unsuccess  not  failure  that 
77 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

dogged  his  steps;  he  was  apparently  a  lover  of 
fine  books;  his  own  dedications,  however  flam- 
boyant and  rhetorical,  are  written  according  to 
the  general  high-flown  usage  of  the  age  and 
prove  nothing  to  the  contrary:  all  antiquarians 
and  bibliomaniacs  are  not  writers  of  exquisite 
prose.  He  gives  as  his  reason  for  dedicating 
Healey's  unprinted  manuscripts  to  Florio  and  to 
the  Earl  of  Pembrols.e  the  fact  that  they  had 
been  patrons  of  Healey  before  his  expatriation 
and  death.  This  is  exactly  the  reason  given  by 
the  editors  of  the  First  Folio  for  their  dedi- 
cation of  the  plays  to  the  Earl  of  Pembroke. 
He  was  a  great  patron  of  the  arts.  Why  then 
should  he  have  wished  his  name  withheld  in  the 
Instance  of  the  Sonnets?  Surely  the  contents  of 
the  Sonnets  are  reason  enough;  and  as  surely 
he  was  '  the  only  begetter  '  of  them.  He  prob- 
ably turned  the  manuscript  over  to  Thorpe.  It 
was  quite  natural  that  the  friend  to  whom  the 
Sonnets  were  addressed  should  hesitate  in  allow- 
ing his  name  to  be  publicly  connected  with  them : 
they  tend  to  prove  him  too  surely  the  false 
friend.  And  yet  were  he  a  lover  of  literature, 
as  he  seems  to  have  been,  as  he  must  have  been 
to  have  been  Shakespeare's  dearest  friend,  con- 
scious of  the  honour  of  Shakespeare's  earlier  es- 
teem, of  his  love  before  the  Dark  Lady  came  be- 
tween them,  jealous  for  Shakespeare's  fame  in 

78 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

later  years  to  come,  he  would  scarcely  hope  for 
the  destruction  of  the  manuscript;  he  would 
countenance  the  publication  of  the  Sonnets  and 
continue  to  play  the  role  of  patron.  And  he 
was  a  patron  of  Shakespeare's,  not  unknown  to 
Thorpe. 

XXIII 

"  From  the  dedicatory  epistles  addressed  by 
Shakespeare  to  the  Earl  of  Southampton  in  the 
opening  pages  of  his  two  narrative  poems, 
Venus  and  Adonis  (1593),  and  Lucrece 
(1594),  from  the  account  given  by  Sir  William 
D'Avenant,  and  recorded  by  Nicholas  Rowe,  of 
the  Earl's  liberal  bounty  to  the  poet,  and  from 
the  language  of  the  Sonnets,"  it  is,  according  to 
Sir  Sidney  Lee,  abundantly  clear  that  the  Son- 
nets were  dedicated  to  my  Lord  of  Southamp- 
ton. There  is  no  internal  evidence  in  the  Son- 
nets tending  to  prove  that  they  were  dedicated 
to  Southampton  rather  than  to  Pembroke;  the 
contrary  indeed,  one  might  refer  to  Pembroke 
as  '  sweet  boy';  Southampton  appears  to  have 
been  always  grown-up.  And  the  tale  recounted 
by  Nicholas  Rowe  in  1709  is  the  merest  hearsay, 
idle  gossip  "  that  my  Lord  Southampton  at  one 
time  gave  him  (Shakespeare)  a  thousand 
pounds  to  go  through  with  a  purchase  which  he 

79 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

heard  he  had  a  mind  to."  It  is  not  probable 
that  Shakespeare  at  any  time  considered  a  pur- 
chase involving  a  thousand  pounds  more  than  he 
had  cash  in  hand;  he  was  an  exceedingly  careful 
trader,  warned  off  from  debt  by  the  failure  of 
his  father.  We  will  grant  that  Venus  and 
Adonis  and  Lucrece  were  dedicated  to 
Southampton,  but  in  1593  and  1594;  the  Son- 
nets date  from  1598  and  1599,  and  there  is  no 
evidence  to  prove  that  Southampton  was  then 
Shakespeare's  patron.  Shakespeare  did  not 
approve  of  the  tactics  of  Southampton  and  his 
friends  during  the  late  nineties.  He  wrote 
Julius  Caesar  to  bring  home  to  them  and  to 
others  the  folly  of  half-baked  rebellions,  and 
portrayed  in  the  character  of  Brutus  the  tragedy 
of  Essex,  as  fine  a  figure  as  graced  the  Eliza- 
bethan pageant,  an  infinitely  greater  than  Ral- 
eigh. But  with  Southampton  he  (Essex)  went 
to  the  Tower  —  they  had  attempted  to  incite  the 
rabble  against  the  Queen.  They  failed  miser- 
ably, more  miserably  even  than  did  Brutus,  Cas- 
sius  and  the  rest.  However  it  is  to  Essex  (and 
not  to  Southampton)  that  Antony's  fine  words 
refer;  he  had  deserved  a  better  fate;  he  was  one 
of  the  great  noblemen  of  all  time;  while  still  a 
lad  of  twenty  he  deposed  Raleigh,  a  man  of 
forty,  from  his  high  place  in  the  queen's  affec- 
tions,—  as  captain  of  the  guard,  Raleigh  had  to 

80 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

stand  at  the  door  with  drawn  sword,  In  his 
brown  and  orange  uniform,  while  within  Essex 
whispered  to  the  spinster  of  fifty-four  things 
which  set  her  heart  beating.  He  was  extremely 
daring,  and  early  developed  great  qualities  of 
which  he  had  at  first  (perhaps)  given  no 
promise. 

XXIV 

"  No  contemporary  document  or  tradition 
suggests  that  Shakespeare  was  the  friend  or  pro- 
tege of  any  man  of  rank  other  than  Southamp- 
ton." Sir  Sidney  Lee  Is  willing  to  believe 
D'Avenant  on  the  word  of  Nicholas  Rowe,  writ- 
ing a  hundred  years  after  the  publication  of  the 
Sonnets,  yet  doubts  the  word  of  Hemlnges  and 
Condell,  Shakespeare's  associates  on  the  stage 
and  his  first  editors,  and  dismisses  their  dedica- 
tion to  Pembroke  —  who,  together  with  his 
brother,  '  prosequted '  both  the  plays,  '  and 
their  Authour  living,  with  so  much  favour ' — 
as  but  so  much  childish  prattle.  This  Is  Sir  Sid- 
ney Lee's  method,  and  suits  his  mood.  How- 
ever, we  can  connect  Shakespeare  with  Lord 
William  Herbert.  His  father's  company  of 
players  produced  Shakespeare's  first  plays  — 
The  True  Tragedie  of  Richard  Duke  of  York 
and  Titus  Andronlcus,  and  very  probably 
8i 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

others:  the  first  and  second  parts  of  Henry 
VI.  Sir  Sidney  Lee  has  never  had  a  play  pro- 
duced; I  know  I  shall  be  everlastingly  grateful 
to  the  man  who  produces  mine;  I  shall  consider 
him  a  patron  of  sorts. 

Granted  then  that  we  can  connect  Shake- 
peare  early  in  his  career  with  the  House  of  Pem- 
broke. In  1593  Lord  Pembroke's  servants,  his 
company  of  players,  were  in  financial  difficulties 
and  soon  disbanded;  shortly  afterwards  the  old 
Earl,  broken  in  health,  retired  to  the  country. 
Here,  on  his  family's  ancient  estate,  young  Wil- 
liam Herbert  grew  to  manhood.  He  was  born 
April  8,  1580,  and  came  to  London  early  in  the 
spring  of  1598.  It  is  to  be  presumed  that,  like 
all  the  young  gentlemen  of  his  age,  he  fre- 
quented the  theatre.  What  more  natural  than 
that  he  should  take  an  especial  interest  in 
Shakespeare,  once  his  father's  protege,  now  the 
leading  and  most  successful,  most  popular  dram- 
atist of  the  day?  What  more  natural  than  that 
Shakespeare  should  be  drawn  to  the  brilliant 
and  charming  son  of  his  old  patron?  An  inti- 
macy sprang  up  between  them.  The  Sonnets 
were  its  natural  outcome. 

And  Mistress  Fitton  is  just  such  another  as 
the  Dark  Lady  bodied  forth  in  Shakespeare's 
verse.  She  was  the  mistress  of  my  Lord  Her- 
bert: a  bastard  son  was  born  to  them;  no  end  of 

82 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

letters  were  written  back  and  forth,  Imploring 
and  repudiating  marriage. 

XXV 

But  enough  of  argument;  doubtless  it  wear- 
ies you.  I  have  however  an  especial  fondness 
for  such  subjects  as  are  debatable.  The  great 
facts  of  the  world  are  not  subject  to  question  — 
the  sun,  the  moon,  the  stars,  man's  right  to 
come  and  go  in  peace  about  the  earth  unhar- 
assed  by  the  tyranny  of  emperors  or  of  priests. 
—  And  yet.  It  may  be,  there  comes  a  time  for 
reaffirming  the  simple  eternal  truths  of  life, 
such  a  time  as  the  present  when  the  nations  in 
their  wrath  with  fury  unexampled  rewrite,  in 
letters  of  blood  and  iron  the  principles  of  one 
common  creed.  There  are,  however,  a  number 
of  things  —  '  just  why  the  sea  is  boiling  hot ' — 
we  might  discuss  amicably;  it  seems  the  sheer- 
est nonsense  to  quibble  concerning  the  strange 
conclusions  of  wilful  Englishmen.  And  yet, 
if  one  is  at  all  interested,  one  must  be  partisan. 
I  do  not  envy  Professor  Raymond  MacDon- 
ald  Alden,  the  editor  of  the  Variorum  Edition 
of  the  Sonnets,  his  Inability  to  come  to  any  sort 
of  conclusion  concerning  them.  To  admire  the 
Sonnets  at  all  is  to  have  some  curiosity  concern- 
ing Mr.  W.  H.,  some  interest  in  T.  T.  the  pub- 

83 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

Usher,  some  admiration  for  the  '  dark  lady  of 
the  virginals.' 

How  oft,  when  thou,  my  music,  music  play'st 
Upon  that  blessed  wood  whose  motion  sounds 
With  thy  sweet  fingers,  when  thou  gently  sway'st 
The  wiry  concord  that  mine  ear  confounds, 
Do  I  envy  those  jacks  that  nimble  leap 
To  kiss  the  tender  inward  of  thy  hand 
Whilst  my  poor  lips,  which  should  that  harvest  reap, 
At  the  wood's  boldness  by  thee  blushing  stand ! 

To  be  so  tickled,  they  would  change  their  state 
And  situation  with  those  dancing  chips. 
O'er  whom  thy  fingers  walk  with  gentle  gait, 
Making  dead  wood  more  blest  than  living  lips. 
Since  saucy  jacks  so  happy  are  in  this, 
Give  them  thy  fingers,  me  thy  lips  to  kiss. 

As  I  have  said,  I  am  a  farmer  with  a  predi- 
lection for  pigs;  I  cannot  pass  a  pen  of  Berk- 
shires  without  enquiring  Into  their  antecedents; 
I  prefer  Hampshires  to  most  poetry;  and  yet, 
perhaps  because  I  have  given  years  of  study  to 
such  matters  I  can  unhesitatingly  appraise  their 
worth.  Will  any  agree  with  me?  Mr.  Hun- 
gerford,  down  the  river,  maintains  that  so  far 
as  the  ordinary  farmer  is  concerned  '  plain 
hog'  is  good  enough;  while  Mr.  Bliss  is  all 
for  the  Chester  White.  We  each  have  our 
own  notions.  But  is  this  true  as  regards  so 
important  a  matter   as  the  genius  of  Shake- 

84 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

speare?  Not  at  all;  we  are  willing  to  accept 
the  say-so  of  any  and  every  pamphleteer.  By 
personal  experience  we  learn  what  we  know  of 
poultry,  taking  the  teachings  of  the  experts  at 
their  face  value,  accepting  their  theories  cum 
grano  sails.  But,  though  we  may  have  been  as- 
sociated for  years  on  the  most  intimate  terms 
with  WiUiam  Shakespeare,  we  can  never  make 
up  our  own  minds  concerning  him.  We  always, 
with  Professor  Alden,  beg  the  question  or  show 
no  interest  in  the  matter  whatsoever.  What 
have  we,  farmers  and  clerks  and  brokers,  to  do 
with  the  most  human  of  the  poets?  I  cannot  in 
so  many  words  state  my  judgment  concerning 
him,  neither  can  I  confine  my  knowledge  to  an 
octavo  page.  He  still  eludes  me,  baffles  me, 
thwarts  my  best  efforts  to  have  at  him.  And 
I  think  that  is,  in  large  measure,  his  eternal 
charm.  What  other  dramatist  could  you  study 
at  school,  read  in  the  library,  and  view  at  the 
theatre  with  the  awed  interest  we  all  of  us  ex- 
hibit at  an  even  passably  decent  presentation  of 
Hamlet  or  Lear  or  Othello?  On  the  after- 
noon of  May  loth,  1897,  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw 
was  present  at  Mr.  Charrington's  production 
of  Ibsen's  A  Doll's  House;  in  the  evening  he 
found  Hamlet  at  the  Olympic  '  not  a  bad  ano- 
dyne after  the  anguish  of  the  Helmer  house- 
hold.'    Throwing      off      the      critic  —  thank 

85 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

Heaven,  It  is  no  longer  necessary  to  criticize 
Shakespeare  - —  he  indulged  a  '  silly  boyish  af- 
fection '  of  his  for  the  play,  which  he  knew 
nearly  by  heart,  thereby  having,  as  he  points 
out,  a  distinct  advantage  over  Mr.  Nutcombe 
Gould,  the  producer.  I  myself  remember 
Petruchio  (Mr.  F.  R.  Benson)  fifteen  years 
ago  at  Stratford-on-Avon  in  my  earliest 
youth;  I  remember  Mr.  Otis  Skinner  (with 
Miss  Ada  Rehan)  in  the  part  a  year  or  two 
later;  then  Mr.  Sothern,  and  Mr.  Eric  Blind 
with  Miss  Margaret  Anglin.  The  play  is 
crude,  slapstick  farce,  by  no  means  the  best  of 
Shakespeare,  and  yet  it  has,  for  me  at  least,  an 
interest  surely  equalling  that  of  Mr.  Shaw  — 
Mr.  Shaw  who  so  maltreats  my  beloved  Mar- 
lowe in  the  preface  to  The  Admirable  Bash- 
ville  that  I  am  almost  ready  to  come  to  blows 
with  him  —  He  speaks  of  him  elsewhere  as  a 
fool  expressing  his  folly  in  blank  verse;  'the 
moment  the  exhaustion  of  the  imaginative  fit 
deprives  him  of  the  power  of  raving,  Marlowe 
becomes  childish  In  thought,  vulgar  and  wooden 
In  humour,  and  stupid  in  his  attempts  at  in- 
vention.' Mr.  Shaw  can  forgive  him  nothing 
on  account  of  his  youth.  Judged  by  the  same 
standard,  placed  against  the  accumulated  wis- 
dom and  wit  of  the  ages,  at  twenty-nine,  Ibsen 
is  even  more  futile;  Mr.  Shaw  himself  a  non- 
86 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

entity.  I  am  almost  ready  to  come  to  blows 
with  him,  and  then  he  paraphrases  the  '  mighty 
lines  ' :  — 

This  is  the  face  that  burnt  a  thousand  boats 
And  banished  Cashel  Byron  from  the  ring  — 

SO  pathetically  that  I  can  only  pity  him  in  his 
prosaic  fumbling  with  politics  and  birth  con- 
trol while  all  the  beauty  of  the  world  lies 
stretched  in  limitless  glory  before  his  sightless 
eyes.  I  forgive  him  as  I  forgive  John  Payne 
his 

What  has  become  of  last  year's  snows? 

translation  of  Villon's  perfect 

Mais  ou  sont  les  neiges  d'anton? 

They  know  not  what  they  do. 

XXVI 

Where  are  the  snows  of  yesteryear?  Where 
those  old  valiant  spirits  that  gathered  at  the 
Mermaid,  drank  deep  of  mine  host's  ale,  and 
regaled  each  other  with  famous  tales  of  prow- 
ess in  camp  and  court?  Has  Marlowe  kissed 
his  lady  on  the  lips?  Is  Jonson  now  at  peace 
with   all  the   world?     Has   Chapman   walked 

87 


AIRY  NOTHINGS 

with  Homer  about  the  walls  of  Troy?  Are 
they  leaning  from  the  parapets  of  Heaven  to 
watch  us,  dressed  in  simpler  garb,  the  pageant 
faded  forever  from  the  streets,  going  about 
our  less  adventurous  tasks?  Has  the  smoke 
of  battle  found  them  where  they  hide?  Have 
they  thrilled  to  a  slaughter  unequalled  save  in 
the  wanton  horrors  of  their  imaginative 
dreams?  They  were  intrigued  by  every 
breath  of  scandal,  delighted  by  the  oaths  of 
every  scheming  blackguard  —  are  they  laugh- 
ing approval  above  the  welter  of  blood  that 
darkens  Europe?  They  were  in  love  with  all 
that  was  adventurous,  reckless,  young  in  life 
and  literature.  I  wonder  are  they  jostling  el- 
bows with  the  holy  prophets  of  whom  Synge 
wrote :  — 

If  the  mitred  bishops  seen  you  that  time,  they'd 
be  the  like  of  the  holy  prophets  I'm  thinking,  do  be 
straining  the  bars  of  Paradise  to  lay  eyes  on  the 
Lady  Helen  of  Troy,  and  she  abroad,  pacing  back 
and  forward,  with  a  nosegay  in  her  golden  shawl. 

I'll  warrant  they,  the  Persons  in  my  Play, 
are  more  interested  in  her  than  in  their  golden 
crowns.  The  beauty  of  Helen  reflected  for- 
ever in  the  epics  of  Homer  is  an  immortal 
splendor;  a  crown  but  a  tawdry  symbol  of 
impotence  menaced  by  every  roisterer  on  the 

88 


OR  WHAT  YOU  WILL 

street.  We  go  about  their  England  calling  in 
vain  to  them;  their  inns  are  gone,  their  homes 
deserted,  only  their  singing  and  their  laughter 
endures  throughout  the  years.  It  Is  a  better 
thing  to  dream  than  to  rear  cities  on  the  sands 
of  time. 

All  passes.     Art  alone 
Enduring  stays  to  us; 
The  bust  outlasts  the  throne, 
The  coin  Tiberius. 


89 


MARY!  MARY! 
A  PLAY  IN  ONE  ACT 


*  Mould  us  our  Shakespeare,  sculptor,  in  the  form 
His  comrades  knew,  rare  Ben  and  all  the  rout 
That  found  the  taproom  of  the  Mermaid  warm 
With  wit  and  wine  and  fellowship,  the  face 
Wherein  the  men  he  chummed  with  found  a  charm 
To  make  them  love  him;  carve  for  us  the  grace 
That  caught  Anne  Hathaway  in  Shottery-side, 
The  hand  that  clasped  Southampton's  in  the  days 
Ere  that  dark  dame  of  passion  and  of  pride 
Burned  in  his  heart  the  brand  of  her  disdain, 
The  eyes  that  wept  when  little  Hamnet  died, 
The  lips  that  learned  from  Marlowe's  and  again 
Taught  riper  lore  to  Fletcher  and  the  rest, 
The  presence  and  demeanour  sovereign 
At  last  at  Stratford  calm  and  manifest, 
That  rested  on  the  seventh  day  and  scanned 
His  work  and  knew  it  good,  and  left  the  quest 
And  like  his  own  enchanter  broke  his  wand.' 

Richard  Hovey. 


MARY!     MARYl 

PERSONS  IN  THE  PLAY 

MARY  FITTON :  21  years  of  age,  young- 
est child  of  Sir  Edward  Fitton,  Kt.,  of  Gaws- 
worth  in  Cheshire,  a  maid  of  honour  at  the 
court  of  Elizabeth;  of  medium  stature,  slender 
and  graceful,  with  raven  black  hair  and  glowing 
expressive  eyes ;  a  woman,  daughter  of  Eve,  al- 
luring, ensnaring,  tyrannical,  '  athirst  for  ad- 
miration to  such  a  pitch  of  wantonness  that  she 
cannot  refrain  from  coquetting  on  every  con- 
ceivable occasion;  born  to  deal  out  rapture  and 
torment  with  both  hands,  the  very  woman  to 
set  in  vibration  every  chord  in  a  poet's  soul.' 
Shakespeare  must  have  admired  her  wit  and 
daring,  her  presence  of  mind  and  her  capricious 
wayward  fancy.  Doubtless  she  was  to  him 
what  Maria  Fiammetta,  the  natural  daughter 
of  a  king,  was  to  Boccaccio.  She  brought  into 
his  life,  the  life  of  a  poor  player,  a  breath  from 
a  higher  world.  It  was  she  who  made  the  first 
advances  as  did  Rosalind  in  As  You  Like  It. 
Who  shall  doubt  that  Shakespeare's  Sonnets, 
passed  in  manuscript  from  hand  to  hand,  were 
not  later  translated  into  Orlando's  verses  and 

93 


MARY!  MARY! 

hung  upon  the  trees  about  the  forest  of  Arden? 
fVho  can  tell  how  much  of  her  personality  lives 
on  in  Beatrice,  Viola,  and  the  imperial  gypsy  of 
the  Nile? 

EDWARD  FITTON:  28  years  of  age, 
her  brother;  tall  and  gangling,  his  awkwardness 
contrasts  sharply  with  his  sister's  madcap  ways, 
as  does  his  complexion  with  hers,  for  he  is  fair, 
zvith  shallow  blue  eyes,  and  a  blond  moustache; 
he  zvas  created  a  baronet  in  idiy. 

FRANCIS:  4^  years  of  age,  a  drawer  at 
the  Mermaid. 

HIS  ASSISTANTS. 

HENRY  CHETTLE:  63  years  of  age,  a 
publisher  living  at  Christ  Church  Gate.  ''  In 
Dekkar's  tract,  A  Knight's  Conjuring,  dating 
from  i6oy,  he  figures  among  the  poets  in  Ely' 
Slum,  where  he  is  introduced  in  the  following 
terms:  'In  comes  Chettle  sweating  and  blow- 
ing, by  reason  of  his  fatness;  to  welcome  whom, 
because  hee  was  of  olde  acquaintance,  all  rose 
up,  and  fell  presentlie  on  their  knees,  to  drinck 
a  health  to  all  the  lovers  of  Hellicon.'  Elze 
has  conjectured,  possibly  with  justice,  that  in  this 
puffing  and  sweating  old  tun  of  flesh,  who  is  so 
zvhimsically  greeted  with  mock  reverence  by  the 
whole  gay  company,  we  have  the  very  model 
from  whom  Shakespeare  drew  his  demigod,  the 
immortal  Sir  John  Falstaff,  beyond  comparison 

94 


MARY!  MARY! 

the  gayest,  most  concrete,  and  most  enter- 
taining figure  in  European  comedy." —  Georg 
Brandes, —  JVilUam  Shakespeare. 

WILLIAM  SHAKESPEARE:  35  years 
of  age,  actor  and  dramatist,  author  of  Romeo 
and  Juliet,  Venus  and  Adonis,  the  Rape  of  Lu- 
crece,  and  other  poems  of  passion;  lover  to  Mis- 
tress Fitton.  In  the  diary  of  John  Manning- 
ham,  of  the  Middle  Temple,  the  following  entry 
occurs,  under  the  date  March  13,  1602: 
"  Upon  a  tyme  when  Burbidge  played  Rich.  5, 
there  was  a  citizen  grone  so  farr  in  liking  with 
him,  that  before  shee  went  from  the  play  shee 
appointed  him  to  come  that  night  unto  her  by  the 
name  of  Ri:  the  J.  Shakespeare  overhearing 
their  conclusion  went  before,  and  was  inter- 
tained  ere  Burbidge  came.  Then  message  being 
brought  that  Rich,  the  3d  was  at  the  dore, 
Shakespeare  caused  returne  to  be  made  that  fVil- 
liam  the  Conquerour  was  before  Rich,  the  3. 
Shakespeare's  name  was  William."  And,  quite 
in  keeping,  Burbage's  was  Richard. 

BEN  JONSON :  26  years  of  age,  poet  and 
dramatist;  strong  and  massive  in  body  and  mind, 
coarse-grained  and  swaggering,  delighting  in  the 
fierce  animal  spirits  of  the  ancients,  with  a 
minute  knowledge  of  their  life  and  religions. — 
It  has  become  a  commonplace  of  criticism  to  re- 
fer to  him  as  '  manly  I  and  yet  he  was  despite 
95 


MARY!  MARY! 

his  airs  of  independence,  a  Tory  poet  and  court- 
flatterer,  one  who  wasted  his  best  efforts  in  the 
creation  of  masques  and  pageants  for  the  pe- 
dantic King  James.  He  could,  however,  at 
times  rise  to  the  supr ernes t  heights  of  altruism; 
as  witness:  —  Marston  and  Chapman  (the 
Rival  Poet  of  the  Sonnets)  having  been  im- 
prisoned for  certain  jibes  at  the  Scotch,  which 
had  been  brought  to  the  notice  of  the  king,  in 
the  comedy  of  Eastward  Ho!  and  it  being  re- 
ported that  they  were  in  danger  of  having  their 
noses  and  ears  cut  off,  Jonson,  of  his  own  free 
will,  claimed  his  share  in  their  responsibility 
and  joined  them  in  prison.  And  he  had  a 
mother  worthy  of  such  a  son.  At  a  supper 
which  he  gave  shortly  after  the  liberation 
of  himself  and  friends,  she  clinked  glasses 
with  him  and  showed  a  paper  containing 
poisonous  powders  which  she  had  intended  mix- 
ing with  his  drink,  had  he  been  sentenced  to 
mutilation ;  adding  that  she  would  not  have  sur- 
vived his  death,  but  would  have  taken  her  por- 
tion of  the  draught. —  And  yet  he  has  been 
accused  of  jealousy,  the  sheerest  libel;  no  saner 
tribute  to  Shakespeare  has  ever  been  penned 
than  that  in  Jonson's  famous  lines.  In  all  the 
length  and  breadth  of  English  drama  he  is  sec- 
ond only  to  Shakespeare,  and  this  is  no  small 
praise. —  He  was  a  posthumous  child,  son  of  a 

96 


MARY!  MARY! 

clergyman  whose  forefathers  had  belonged  to 
the  gentry.  Two  years  after  his  father's  death 
his  mother  married  a  second  time;  Bens  step- 
father was  a  tnaster  bricklayer.  Thomas  Ful- 
ler describes  the  future  great  man,  trowel  in 
hand,  a  book  in  his  pocket,  helping  in  the  struc- 
ture of  Lincoln's  Inn.  But  he  could  not  long 
endure  such  an  occupation  (at  which,  you  may 
be  sure,  together  with  his  conversion  to  Roman 
Catholicism,  while  in  durance  on  account  of  a 
duel,  his  later  adversaries  did  not  fail  to  jeer,) 
so  he  went  as  a  soldier  to  the  Netherlands; 
where,  on  one  occasion,  under  the  eyes  of  both 
camps,  he  killed  one  of  the  enemy's  soldiers  in 
single  combat.  Returning  to  London,  (he  was 
a  child  of  the  town,  as  was  Shakespeare  of  the 
country,)  he  iJiarried  at  the  early  age  of  nine- 
teen; — ■  Shakespeare  was  eighteen  when  he  mar- 
ried Anne  Hathaway.  Twenty-six  years  later 
in  his  conversations  with  Drummond  of  Haw- 
thornden,  whom  he  visited  while  on  a  walking 
tour  through  England  and  Scotland,  he  de- 
scribed his  wife  as  'a  shrew,  yet  honest'  .  .  . 
He  had  the  misfortune  to  survive  his  children. — 
For  considerably  over  a  century  following  his 
death,  it  was  considered,  by  young  poets,  wits 
and  courtiers,  just  cause  for  pride  to  be  sealed 
'  of  the  tribe  of  Ben.'  He  himself  tells  us  that 
the  first  speech  of  Sylla's  ghost  in  the  tragedy  of 

97 


MARY!  MARY! 

Cataline  was  written  after  he  had  parted  with 
his  friends  at  the  tavern;  he  '  had  drunk  well 
that  night  and  had  brave  notions.'  Not  with- 
out humour,  as  Dr.  Brandes  remarks^  using 
Ben's  favourite  word,  is  the  glimpse  we  catch  of 
him  in  France  while  travelling  as  tutor  with  Sir 
Walter  Raleigh's  son, —  Sir  Walter  was  at  the 
time,  imprisoned  in  the  Tower  awaiting  execu- 
tion. It  was  young  Raleigh's  pleasure  to  get  his 
venerable  companion  drunk  beyond  the  powers 
of  utterance,  and  then  wheel  him  in  a  barrow 
about  the  streets  of  Paris,  and  so  exhibit  him 
to  the  astonished  and  delighted  citizens. 

JOHN  FLETCHER  :  20  years  of  age,  son 
of  the  queen's  chaplain,  the  Bishop  of  London; 
horn  in  Rye  in  Sussex,  where  at  the  time,  his 
father  was  vicar.  '  In  an  age  of  song,  when 
every  playwright  could  on  occasion  produce  a 
lyric  or  two  of  remarkable  grace  and  loveliness, 
songs  in  every  style,  and  always  right,  always 
beautiful,  seemed  to  flow  by  nature  from  Fletch- 
er's pen.'  It  was  due  as  much  to  his  genius  as 
to  the  blindness  of  the  critics  that  for  almost  a 
century  after  the  Restoration  he  (and  his  col- 
laborator Beaumont)  were  the  most  popular  of 
Elizabethen  dramatists. 

JOHN  LYLY :  46  years  of  age,  university 
graduate,  poet  and  dramatist.  The  best  of  his 
work  was  published  before  15^2.     He  was  the 

98 


MARY!  MARY! 

author  of  Euphues  or  the  Anatomy  of  JVit, 
( 1 578) ,  the  most  influential  and  popular  book 
in  England  before  the  coming  of  Marlowe. 
His  vogue,  however,  was  rapidly  declining,  and, 
so  far  as  is  known,  he  died  poor  and  neglected. 
Elizabeth,  who  professed  to  admire  his  work, 
did  nothing  for  him,  though  he  lived  for  years 
on  the  hope  of  becoming  master  of  the  revels 
at  court.  He  was  married,  the  father  of  two 
sons  and  a  daughter. 

MICHAEL  DRAYTON :  36  years  of  age, 
stolid  and  plodding,  already  regarded  as  a  pla- 
giarist in  I5q8,  as  appears  from  certain  lines 
of  Edward  Guilpin's  in  his  Skialetheia.  The 
influence  of  Shakespeare  is  noticeable  in  the 
iSgg  edition  of  Drayton's  Idea;  and  this 
is  of  some  importance  as  proving  the  Sonnets  to 
have  been  written  before  that  date,  though  they 
were  not  published  until  i6og.  He  was  born  in 
Hartshull  in  Warwickshire,  and  lies  buried  in 
Westminster  Abbey. 

JOHN  FLORIO:  47  years  of  age,  a  lexi- 
cographer and  translator,  of  Tuscan  origin,  of 
middle  stature,  swarthy  and  strutting.  He  had 
been  a  teacher  of  French  and  Italian  at  Oxford 
University.  It  has  been  suggested  that  he  was 
satirised  by  Shakespeare  in  the  character  of 
Holofernes,  the  pompous  pedant,  in  Love's 
Labour's  Lost.  He  is  mentioned  by  Wood,  in 
99 


MARY!  MARY! 

Athena  Oxoniensis,  as  a  very  useful  man  in  his 
profession,  zealous  for  his  religion,  and  deeply 
attached  to  England.  His  last,  and  perhaps 
greatest  work  %vas  a  translation  of  Montaigne's 
Essays,  published  in  folio  in  i6oj,  and  dedi- 
cated to  the  queen.  Special  interest  attaches  to 
this  work  from  the  circumstance  that  of  the  sev- 
eral copies  of  the  first  edition  in  the  British 
Museum  Library,  one  bears  the  autograph  of 
Shakespeare  and  another  that  of  Ben  Jonson. — 
The  lines  I  give  him  to  read  appeared  anony- 
mously about  1600;  it  is  doubtful  if  he  be  the 
author  of  them,  but,  though  he  wrote  quite  flu- 
ently in  verse,  I  could  find  nothing  of  his  so  suit- 
able to  my  purpose,  and,  this  once,  have  acted 
arbitrarily. 

WILLIAM  KEMP:  28  years  of  age,  a  jig 
dancer.  *'  The  Rev.  W.  A.  Harrison  called  at- 
tention to  evidence  which  brings  Mrs.  Fitton 
into  connection  with  a  member  of  Shakespeare's 
company,  that  is,  the  Lord  Chamberlain' s  com- 
pany, leaving  it  easily  to  be  inferred  that  she 
must  have  been  acquainted  zvith  the  members  of 
the  company,  and  especially  with  such  as  were 
more  prominent.  In  1600  William  Kemp,  the 
clown  of  the  company,  dedicated  his  '  Nine 
Daies  JVonder '  to  '  Mistress  Anne  Fitton, 
Mayde  of  Honour  to  most  sacred  Mayde,  Royal 
Queene  Elizabeth.'  The  book  gives  an  ac- 
100 


MARY!  MARY! 

count  of  a  journey  which  Kemp  had  performed, 
morris-dancing  from  London  to  Norwich.  As 
Dyce  maintained,  when  he  edited  Kemp's  book 
for  the  Camden  Society,  Mrs.  Fitton's  Chris- 
tion  name  was  given  erroneously  as  *  Anne* 
The  error  may  have  originated  from  Kemp  not 
being  well  acquainted  with  Mistress  Fitton's 
Christian  name.  Perhaps,  however,  it  is  more 
probable  that  he  wrote  '  Marie,'  a  name  which 
might  so  be  written  as  to  be  easily  mistaken  for 
'Anne*  But,  however  this  may  be,  Elizabeth 
certainly  had  no  maid  of  honour  Anne  Fitton  in 
IS99  or  1600.  It  follows  that  the  person  in- 
tended by  Kemp  was  Mistress  Mary  Fitton;  and 
a  good  deal  of  light  is  thus  thrown  on  her  char- 
acter. That  one  of  the  Queen's  maids  of  hon- 
our should  be  chosen  as  the  patroness  of  a  publi- 
cation of  so  comparatively  frivolous  a  character 
as  this  of  Kemp's  might  well  seem  surprising. 
But  facts  already  adduced  make  this  seem 
much  less  wonderful." —  Thomas  Tyler,  Shake- 
speare's Sonnets.- — Among  the  facts  already 
adduced  might  be  noted  the  following:  '  Mary 
Fitton,  maid  of  honour,  had  one  bastard  by 
Wm.  E.  of  Pembroke,  ^  two  bastards  by  Sir 
Richard  Leveson,  Kt.' —  Kemp  from  the  be- 
ginning played  all  the  chief  low-comedy  parts  in 
Shakespeare's  dramas  —  Peter  and  Balthasar 
in    Romeo     and    Juliet,     Shallow    in    Henry 

lOI 


MARY!  MARY! 

IV,  Lancelot  in  the  Merchant  of  Venice, 
Dogberry  in  Much  Ado  About  Nothing, 
Touchstone  in  As  You  Like  It.  He  was,  per- 
haps the  most  popular  member  of  the  com- 
pany; but  in  1602  he  deserted  and  went  over  to 
Henslowe.  His  loss  was  keenly  felt;  Shake- 
speare sent  the  following  shaft  after  him  from 
the  lips  of  Hamlet: — 

And  let  those  who  play  your  clowns  speak  no  more 
than  is  set  down  for  them,  for  there  be  of  them  that 
will  themselves  laugh,  to  set  on  some  quantity  of 
barren  spectators  to  laugh  too;  though,  in  the  mean- 
time, some  necessary  question  of  the  play  be  then  to 
be  considered:  that's  villainous,  and  shows  a  most  piti- 
ful ambition  in  the  fool  that  uses  it. 

His  description  of  the  *  Nine  Dates  Won' 
der,*  with  its  arrogant  dedication,  shows  how 
conceited  Kemp  must  have  been;  and  Hamlet 
shows  us  how  he  must  have  annoyed  Shake- 
speare with  his  '  gags '  and  interpolations. 
This  reproof,  however,  is  couched  in  quite  gen- 
eral terms;  certain  far  sharper  criticisms,  con- 
tained in  the  edition  of  160^,  were  expunged 
when  the  wanderer  returned  to  the  company. 

SIR  WALTER  RALEIGH:     47  years  of 

age,  the  very  type  of  the  vigourous  versatility 

of  the  Elizabethan  period  —  soldier,  seaman, 

statesman,  poet,  historian,  philosopher,  courtier 

102 


MARY!  MARY! 

and  wit;  and  always  he  played  Ms  part  with  con- 
summate art  and  self-assurance.  He  discov- 
ered the  Guianas,  and  established  the  first  Brit- 
ish colony  in  North  America,  Virginia,  nained 
by  him  in  compliment  to  the  Queen.  He  intro- 
duced potatoes  into  Ireland  and  tobacco  into 
England, —  tobacco  had,  however,  been  cul- 
tivated for  years  in  Portugal  and  was  known 
in  France  at  the  court  of  Queen  Catharine 
de  Medici.  He  fought  in  the  Netherlands, 
in  Ireland,  in  Spain,  in  Africa,  and  here 
and  there  about  the  seas;  it  was  his  advice 
{not  to  board  the  Spanish  Galleons)  that  made 
possible  Drake's  victory  over  the  Armada. 
—  And  Spenser  styled  him  '  the  summer's  night- 
ingale.' Yet  he  was  altogether  of  the  world 
worldly;  a  pirate,  an  opportunist,  almost  the 
murderer  of  his  young  rival  Essex;  and,  after 
Essex's  execution,  he  was  the  best  hated  man  in 
England,  unpopular  with  the  people,  hissed  and 
hooted  whenever  he  appeared  upon  the  streets. 
Heroism  is  simple,  homespun,  almost  selfless; 
Raleigh  was  ever  motivated,  acquiring  wealth 
or  power.  I  know  he  pleaded  for  Udell,  but 
there  is  for  me  but  one  great  act  in  his  life:  when 
he  married  and  forfeited  the  Queen's  favour, 
the  Queen  who  could  brook  no  rival.  Raleigh 
had  seduced  Elizabeth  Throckmorton,  a  maid 
of  honour;  reckless  of  consequences,  he  made 
103 


MARY!  MARY! 

her  his  wife, —  and,  in  consequence,  went  to  the 
Tower  for  the  first  time. —  His  death,  the 
speech  from  the  scaffold  —  he  seems  almost  to 
have  atoned  for  his  life,  if  that  were  possible. 

WILLIAM  HERBERT:  ig  years  of  age, 
eldest  son  of  the  Earl  of  Pembroke,  and  Shake- 
speare's best  beloved.  Very  probably  the  hand- 
somest and  best  liked  young  man  in  the  England 
of  his  day. 


104 


MARY!  MARY! 

November,  iS99-  •  •  •  T^^^  taproom  of  the 
Mermaid  Tavern  in  Cheapside.  Here  the 
Syren,  a  literary  club  founded  by  Sir  Walter 
Raleigh,  held  its  meetings. 

About  seven  or  seven-thirty  in  the  evening. 

In  the  back  a  grilled  window  through  which 
one  may  see  the  lights  in  the  houses  opposite  and 
an  occasional  party  passing  with  lanterns,  or  the 
night-watch  on  his  rounds.  To  the  right  of  the 
window,  a  door  opening  onto  the  street.  Be- 
fore the  window,  a  long  wooden  bench  and  a 
table  running  lengthwise  with  the  wall.  To 
right  and  left,  other  such  tables  and  benches. 
But  there  is  an  open  space  in  the  centre  of  the 
room,  reserved  for  the  speaker  having  the 
floor.  In  the  far  corner  to  the  left,  a  door 
leading  into  the  rest  of  the  house.  The  ceilings 
are  raftered  and  plastered;  the  walls  are  pan- 
elled and  —  'twas  good  advice;  mine  host  of  the 
Mermaid  doubtless  followed  it  — '  for  thy 
walls,  a  pretty  slight  drollery,  or  the  story  of 
the  prodigal,  or  the  German  hunting  in  water- 
work,  is  worth  a  thousand  of  these  bed-hang- 
ings and  these  fly-bitten  tapestries! 
105 


MARY!  MARY! 

The  door  from  the  street  opens,  and 
MARY,  disguised  as  a  young  gentleman  of  the 
court,    enters    accompanied   by    her   brother 

EDWARD. 

MARY:  [looking  curiously  about  the  room]. 
So  this  is  where  they  hold  their  meetings,  full 
of  fine  talk,  art  and  love  and  war? 

EDWARD:     Yes.   .   .   .  O'  Wednesdays. 

MARY :  A  strange  place.  Who  would  think 
to  look  for  my  Will  o'  the  Wisp  in  a  taproom? 

EDWARD:  And  why  not?  Think  you  he  is 
always  sighing,  or  wracking  his  poor  brain  for 
rhymes?     A  man  must  laugh,  or  turn  Papist. 

MARY:  He  told  me  he  was  going  to  read  a 
sonnet  here  to-night,  praising  my  eyes. 

EDWARD:     The  first? 

MARY :  No,  not  the  first.  And  yet  he  would 
not  let  me  see  it.  The  club  must  pass  upon  it. 
If  they  do  not  like  it,  then  he  thinks  it  unworthy 
of  me,  and  so  destroys  it. 

EDWARD:  He  should  destroy  them  all.  I 
have  no  patience  with  these  ballad-mongers, 
littering  the  world  with  their  rhymes. 

MARY:  Hush!  for  I  am  all  a-tiptoe  to  hear 
his  verses  read,  almost  mad  with  waiting. 

EDWARD:  Say  rather,  mad  to  come  on  such 
an  errand.      If  you  were  seen,  the  Queen  — 

MARY:  [putting  her  hand  over  his  mouth], 
io6 


MARY!  MARY! 

Hush!  there's  no  danger.  But,  oh,  I'm  glad 
you're  with  me. 

EDWARD:  Certes,  for  you  could  not  venture 
out  alone,  in  such  a  guise. 

MARY:  Pray,  your  reason,  sir?  I  would 
have  come  alone  —  at  least,  I  think  I  would 
have.     You  never  heard  him  read  his  verses. 

EDWARD:  Nor  do  I  care  to.  I  prefer 
Chapman  or  Henslowe's  comedies. 

MARY:  Blasphemous  Ned!  And  I — (ah 
me!)  I  have  so  longed  to  watch  him  when  he 
did  not  know  that  I  was  nigh,  when  he  was  just 
himself  and  not  the  lover,  not  the  poet,  not  the 
actor,  just  plain  Will  Shakespeare  of  Stratford 
Town, 

EDWARD:     Is  he  ever  anything  else? 

MARY:  His  heart  Is  always  prostrate, 
kneeling  to  me  :  — 

In  the  old  age  black  was  not  counted  fair, 
Or  if  it  were,  it  bore  not  beauty's  name ; 
But  now  is  black  beauty's  successive  heir. 

EDWARD:  I  had  as  leave  hear  a  dog  bay  the 
moon. 

MARY:  And  yet  you  steal  his  verses.  I 
have  noticed,  when  he  thought  me  busy  with 
other  things  and  unconscious  of  his  presence, 
how  he  gazed  upon  me  with  an  awed  wonder  in 
his  eyes.  Heigh-ho,  its  different  when  a  poet 
107 


MARY!  MARY! 

loves;  he  woos  with  such  a  myriad  of  gorgeous 
words;  he  lifts  the  ordinary  passions  —  and  I 
suppose  they  are  ordinary  —  out  of  the  com- 
monplace and  gives  to  every  phrase  a  new 
significance.  The  sun,  the  moon,  the  stars  — 
'  Diana's  waiting  women  ' —  grown  familiar 
with  the  years,  appear  to  put  on  a  new  dress  and 
trip  across  the  heavens  lii<:e  fairies  in  a  masque. 

EDWARD:     None  can  usurp  his  place? 

MARY :     Not  to-day,  not  to-morrow. 

EDWARD:  Why,  then,  do  you  coquette  so 
wantonly  ? 

MARY:  Michievous  me!  He  is  so  quaint 
when  he  is  jealous. 

EDWARD:  His  love  vies  with  his  patience. 
What  If  your  madness  wearied  him  ? 

MARY:     Not  to-day  —  Listen:  — 

Tell  me  thou  lov'st  elsewhere ;  but  in  my  sight, 
Dear  heart,  forbear  to  glance  thine  eyes  aside : 
What  need'st  thou  wound  with  cunning,  when  thy 

might 
Is  more  than  my  o'er-press'd  defence  can  bide? 

[She  has  slid  into  a  place  at  the  table,  way  for- 
ward on  the  left.]  Call  the  drawer,  Ned;  I 
would  some  cherry  wine. 

EDWARD   \_c ailing']  :     Francis  I 
FRANCIS  [within]  :     Anon,  sir,  anon. 
EDWARD:     Come  hither,  sirrah. 
io8 


MARY!  MARY! 

\_Enter  Francis} 

FRANCIS:  Coming,  sir.  You  are  welcome, 
sir. 

EDWARD  [seating  himself  on  the  bench  be- 
side Mary]  :  The  young  gentleman  here  de- 
sires a  glass  of  cherry-wine;  and  for  myself  a 
cup  of  canary  with  sugar  in  it. 

FRANCIS:  Aye^  sir.  On  the  instant,  sir. 
[He  starts  away]  : 

MARY  [recalling  him]  :  Francis,  knowest 
thou  one  Will  Shakespeare? 

FRANCIS:     Aye,  sir;  that  I  do,  sir. 
MARY:     He  wears  my  Lord  Chamberlain's 
livery? 

FRANCIS :     Aye,  sir. 

MARY:     I  prithee,  of  what  humour  is  he? 
FRANCIS:     Of  a  very  pleasant  humour,  an' 
it  please  you,  sir. 

MARY:     Hast  known  him  long? 

[Their  dialogue  is  interrupted  by  the  en- 
trance from  the  street  of  chettle,  Shake- 
speare, JONSON,   FLETCHER,  LYLY,  DRAY- 
TON,   FLORIO,   KEMP,   and  several  others, 
■    poets  and  players.      They  are  all  chatting 
and  laughing,  jostling  each  other  in  high 
spirits.] 
FRANCIS:     Let  me   see;   about  Michaelmas 
next  it  will  be  — 

109 


MARY!  MARY! 

SHAKESPEARE  [to  CHETTLE]  :  And  his  elo- 
quence be  other  than  '  Anon,  sir,' — 

FRANCIS  [continuing,  to  MARY  and  edward]  : 
In  sooth,  sir,  as  I  reckon  it,  twelve  years. 

SHAKESPEARE  [contitiuingf']  :  Or  '  as  true 
as  day,'  or  '  as  God  shall  mend  me,'  and  such 
lil^e  parrot  phrases,  may'st  thou  be  strung  up 
by  the  heels  like  a  Yorkshire  boar  at  the  butch- 
er's. 

CHETTLE :  God  a'  mercy !  so  should  I  be 
hanged  indeed. 

JONSON:     No  man  can  escape  his  fate. 
CHETTLE:     An'   I   be   not   better  than   the 
best   of   you,    I   am   as   withered   as   a   dried 
prune. 

MARY  [to  FRANCIS] :  Is  that  not  Will 
Shakespeare  there  with  the  fat  old  man? 

[CHETTLE  has  Seated  himself  at  a  table  in 
the  centre  of  the  room,  with  SHAKESPEARE 
on  his  left  and  jonson  on  his  right.  The 
others  take  places  here  and  there  at  the 
other  tables.  FRANCIS  turns  and  examines 
the  new  arrivals.^ 
'CHETTLE:  Francis! 
FRANCIS:     Anon,  sir. 

MARY:     My  question,   Francis.      Can'st  not 
answer?     Do'st  not  know  him? 
FRANCIS:     As  I  live,  sir. 
CHETTLE    [in  a  voice  of  thunder']  :     Fran- 

IIO 


MARY!  MARY! 

CIS,  you  fleshless  monstrosity,  you  fiddle-bow, 
you  starvelling  logger-head,  you  — 

FRANCIS:     Anon,  sir. 

CHETTLE:  Oh,  for  breath  to  speak  in  just 
comparisons  1 

FRANCIS:  Anon,  sir;  coming,  sir.  [He 
goes  towards  chettle's  table. ^ 

SHAKESPEARE     \_tO    FRANCIS]  :       So  ?       I    had 

thought  to  hear  thee  answer,  '  Score  three  pints 
of  bastard  and  brew  a  pottle  of  ale,  simple  of 
itself; 

CHETTLE  :  As  I  live  by  my  wits,  rare  words, 
a  brave  world  1 

FRANCIS:     Anon,  sir. 

CHETTLE:  I'll  be  sworn  I  make  as  good  use 
of  liquor  as  many  a  man  doth  of  a  prayer  book; 
but  I'll  no  hen  fruit  in  my  brewage,  nor  lime 
either. 

EDWARD :     Francis. 

CHETTLE:  Away,  you  rogue.  Look  to  the 
guests. 

FRANCIS  \_over  his  shoulder  as  he  hurries 
out'\  :     Anon,  sir. 

CHETTLE:  That  ever  this  fellow  should  be 
so  well-languaged  and  yet  an  under-skinker  in 
Cheapside,  passeth  my  comprehension. 

JONSON:  He  Is  as  witty  as  a  serving  man  in 
Menander. 

CHETTLE:  And  as  valiant  as  Errcles,  or 
I II 


MARY!  MARY! 

I'm  a  comfit-maker's  wife.  [The  door  opens; 
and  RALEIGH  and  HERBERT  enter  from  the 
street.] 

CHETTLE  [to  Shakespeare]  :  Here  comes 
Sir  Walter  and  your  young  friend,  Herbert. 

MARY  [to  her  brother]  :  Who  is  that  beau- 
tiful young  man? 

EDWARD:  The  Earl  of  Pembroke's  son; 
handsome  young  devil. 

MARY  [to  herself]  :  Oh,  I'm  so  glad  I 
came. 

SHAKESPEARE  [rising  and  motioning  HERB- 
ERT to  a  place  beside  him].  Welcome,  friend. 
Sir  Walter,  your  servant.  [  The  company  rises, 
while  the  newcomers  seat  themselves.] 

RALEIGH  [barely  nodding  his  head] : 
Friends. 

HERBERT  [with  a  wave  of  the  hand]  :  Gen- 
tlemen. 

ALL:     Your  servants. 

[The  company  resume  their  former  places. 
FRANCIS  and  his  assistants  move  here  and 
there  serving  ale,  honey-drink,  apple-drink, 
and  various  kinds  of  wine.  Never  before 
or  since  has  England  enjoyed  so  many  dif- 
ferent kinds  of  beverages;  there  were 
fifty-six  varieties  of  French  wine  in  use  and 
thirty-six  of  Spanish  and  Italian,  to  say 
nothing  of  the  many  home-made,  and  all 

112 


MARY!  MARY! 

sorts  of  strong  and  small  beer.     RALEIGH 

JONSON,    CHETTLE,    FLORIO    and    EDWARD 

FITTON  smoke.'] 

CHETTLE  [above  the  buzz  of  talk]  :  By  the 
Lord,  lads,  shall  we  to  business? 

CHORUS  OF  voices:  Aye,  marry.  Order! 
Order  I 

RALEIGH :     Concerning  Marlowe,  was  it  not  ? 

DRAYTON:  You  mistake,  sir;  we  were  to 
bring  verses  of  our  own  and  read  them  here. 

LYLY:  Such  as  might  vie  with  Marlowe's 
lines  to  Helen,  not  in  expression  only,  but  in 
conception,  not  in  metre,  but  in  beauty. 

CHETTLE:     'Tis  impossible. 

SHAKESPEARE  :  What !  so  swift  to  appraise 
that  of  which  thou  art  still  in  ignorance? 

CHETTLE:  'Tis  impossible.  Dost  thou 
hear  me.  Will?  When  any  man  surpasses  this 
same  Kit  Marlowe,  may  a  cup  of  sack  be  my 
poison. 

SHAKESPEARE:  How  now,  my  sweet  crea- 
ture of  bombast,  sayest  thou  I  cannot? 

CHETTLE:  I  say,  thou  canst  not?  I'll  see 
thee  damned  ere  I  say  thou  canst  not. 

SHAKESPEARE:     Marry,  then? 

CHETTLE:  But  an  thou  dost,  I  am  a  brew- 
er's horse  or  a  Jew,  an  Ebrew  Jew. 

DRAYTON  [to  chettle]  :  You  were  to  read 
Marlowe's  lines,  Hal. 

113 


MARY!  MARY! 

CHETTLE:     I  cannot. 

LYLY:  Your  reason,  sir?  We  who  have 
our  own  verses  cannot  read  his. 

CHETTLE:  Then  must  Francis  read  them, 
for  what  with  halloing  and  roaring  of  answers 
in  church,  I  have  no  more  voice  than  a  spar- 
row. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Thou  hast  not  seen  the  in- 
side of  a  church  since  thy  namesake  was  king. 

CHETTLE:     Hal?     'Tis  a  royal  name. 

JONSON:     Of  late  fallen  into  disuse. 

CHETTLE:  Yet  was  I  as  virtuously  given  as 
a  man  need  be;  drank  little  and  gave  such  sar- 
canet  surety  for  my  oaths  as  might  a  Sunday- 
citizen. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Not  within  the  memory  of 
any  here  present. 

CHETTLE:  Do  thou  amend  thy  plays,  and 
I'll  amend  my  life. 

HERBERT  [who  has  been  watching  MARY]  : 
Let  the  young  gentleman  yonder  read  Mar- 
lowe's lines  and  I'll  warrant  you  none  shall  sur- 
pass their  beauty. 

CHETTLE  [observing  MARY,  who  is  somewhat 
taken  aback  by  being  thus  suddenly  drawn  into 
their  discussion]  :  He  hath  just  such  a  fire  in 
his  eye  as  burned  in  Kit's.  By  the  Lord,  I 
could  have  believed  him  his  younger  brother. 
Come  lad;  you  shall  honour  us. 
114 


MARY!  MARY! 

MARY :  I  fear  I  am  untutored  in  these  mat- 
ters. 

chettle:  Matters  or  no  matters,  it  mat- 
ters not.     I  will  not  be  gainsaid. 

HERBERT  [rising,  taking  a  manuscript  copy 
of  the  ever  famous  lines,  and  going  over  and 
putting  it  into  mary's  hand]  :     Have  no  fear. 

MARY:  Only  reluctance  to  mar  with  faulty 
elocution  the  faultless  rythm  of  another's  verse. 

HERBERT  [leading  her  gently  into  the  open 
space  before  chettle's  table]  :  The  lines  are 
beautiful;  had  I  not  fixed  my  eyes  upon  your 
face  and  heard  the  music  of  your  voice,  I  might 
have  said  no  man  could  add  to  their  great  store 
of  loveliness,  but  now  —  Have  no  fear. 

MARY:     You  are  over-kind. 

HERBERT  [bowing]  :  I  am  your  servant,  sir. 
[He  goes  back  to  his  place  at  the  table.] 

CHETTLE:  Silence,  boys;  gallants  all,  si- 
lence.     [To  mary].     Come,  lad,  come. 

MARY  [first  looking  helplessly  about  the 
room,  takes  up  the  manuscript  and  reads]  : 

Was  this  the  face  that  launched  a  thousand  ships, 
And  burned  the  topless  towers  of  Ilium?  — 
Sweet  Helen,  make  me  immortal  with  a  kiss !  — 
Her  lips  suck  forth  my  soul ;  see  where  it  flies !  — 
Come,  Helen,  come,  give  me  my  soul  again. 
Here  will  I  dwell,  for  heaven  is  in  these  lips, 
And  all  is  dross  that  is  not  Helena. 


MARY!  MARY! 

I  will  be  Paris,  and  for  love  of  thee, 
Instead  of  Troy,  shall  Wittenberg  be  sacked, 
And  I  will  combat  with  weak  Menelaus, 
And  wear  thy  colours  on  my  plumed  crest; 
Yes,  I  will  wound  Achilles  in  the  heel, 
And  then  return  to  Helen  for  a  kiss. 
Oh,  thou  art  fairer  than  the  evening  air 
Clad  in  the  beauty  of  a  thousand  stars ; 
Brighter  art  thou  than  flaming  Jupiter 
When  he  appeared  to  hapless  Semele ; 
More  lovely  than  the  monarch  of  the  sky 
In  wanton  Arethusa's  azured  arms; 
And  none  but  thou  shall  be  my  paramour! 

[The  manuscript  slides  from  her  hands  to 
the  floor.'] 
CHETTLE:     Bravo!     bravo!     [General    ap- 
plause; cries  of  "  Well  read."] 
CHETTLE:     Excellent  well  read. 

[mary  hesitates  a  moment,  and  then  runs 

hack,  blushing  the  least  bit,  to  her  place 

beside  her  brother.] 

HERBERT  [rising]  :     Sir,  and  I  were  a  maid 

and  wooed  with  such  words  in  such  a  voice,  I 

would  yield  me  immediate  to  your  embrace. 

SHAKESPEARE  [to  mary]  :  Sir,  and  you 
were  a  maid,  I  well  might  sue  in  some  such 
words  for  such  another  kiss  as  Helen's  from 
your  lips. 

MARY:     I  fear  you  flatter  me. 

ii6 


MARY!  MARY! 

HERBERT:  No,  on  my  honour,  I  speak 
truth. 

CHETTLE:     'Twas  excellent  well  read. 

LYLY:  Balanced  sentence  for  sentence,  as 
harmonious  as  the  plash  of  waves  along  the 
beach. 

CHETTLE:  How  now,  you  rhymers,  can  do 
as  well? 

DRAYTON :  Art  improves  with  age ;  year  by 
year  we  learn  more  from  the  ancients  and 
from  nature,  and  in  our  larger  knowledge 
of  life  may  well  improve  upon  their  handi- 
work. 

CHETTLE:  No,  by'r  Lady,  no.  There  has 
but  one  lover  lived  in  our  time;  improve  upon 
the  ancients  if  you  will. 

JONSON:     Say  rather  if  you  can. 

CHETTLE:  I  care  not.  But  this  same  Mar- 
lowe —  I  defy  you.  A  rogue  and  a  villain,  but 
a  most  sweet  spoken  youth,  who  could  concoct 
you  a  proper  lament  upon  a  faithless  mistress 
as  lightly  as  he  had  within  the  hour  debauched 
her. 

DRAYTON:  For  my  part,  I  care  not  for 
such  adventurers. 

FLORIO:  Nor  I.  Love  should  be  civihsed, 
not  barbarous. 

CHETTLE:  Adventurers,  say  you?  I  defy 
adventurers  I  A  plague  on  such  damnable  ex- 
117 


MARY!  MARY! 

pressions.  'Twas  a  most  excellent  good  word 
before  it  became  ill-sorted,  now  is  it  as  odious 
as  the  word  '  occupy.'  Are  we  not  all  ad- 
venturers, voyaging  hither  and  thither,  we  know 
not  where,  about  the  seas  of  life  in  rotten  leaky 
old  tubs? 

SHAKESPEARE:     Not  angry,  Hal? 

CHETTLE:  If  his  conceit  were  not  as  thick 
as  Tewksbury  mustard,  he  had  not  used  such 
a  word.  I  would  rather  than  forty  capons, 
Kit  were  here  to  answer  him.  A  plague  on  all 
cowards!     Is  there  no  virtue  extant? 

SHAKESPEARE:  Come,  you  pitiful-hearted 
Titan,  what's  this  you  mutter? 

CHETTLE:  It  goes  hard  against  my  stom- 
ach that  one  who  has  not  so  much  as  clapped 
eye  upon  this  same  Kit  of  Canterbury  —  God 
rest  his  soul !  —  should  speak  of  him  as  I  might 
of  Bob  Greene. 

JONSON:  Not  that  my  judgment  Is  of 
years  — 

CHETTLE  [interrupting]  :  My  liver  cries 
out  against  all  blasphemers  of  true  worth. 
[To  a  drawer].     Boy,  a  cup  of  sack. 

JONSON  [soberly.  Shakespeare  produced 
his  first  play  after  it  had  been  refused  by  hens- 
LOWE]  :  And  yet,  methinks,  our  Will  here 
doth  far  outshine  Greene  or  Kyd  or  Marlowe's 
mighty  line. 

ii8 


MARY!  MARY! 

CHETTLE  \^grudgingly ;  he  loves  WILL  SHAKE- 
SPEARE as  FALSTAFF  loved  the  PRINCE]  :  And 
any  could,  'twould  be  this  same  mad  mounte- 
bank Will ;  a  plague  on  him. 

SHAKESPEARE:     What,  woulds't  revile  me? 

CHETTLE:  Aye,  and  to  thy  face.  I  speak 
ill  of  no  man  behind  his  back. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Thou  hast  grown  so  fat- 
witted  with  drinking  old  sack  and  unbuttoning 
thee  after  supper,  that  thou  hast  forgotten  what 
is  due  the  present  company.  How  canst  thou 
exalt  one  above  the  rest? 

CHETTLE:  Indeed  thou  comest  near  me 
now,  Will;  I  am  overgiven  to  praising  my  fel- 
lows. 

SHAKESPEARE:  What  a  devil  hast  thou  to 
do  with  the  paying  of  compliments? 

CHETTLE:  By'r  Lady,  not  so  much  as  my 
hostess  of  the  tavern  when  she  has  borne  and 
borne,  and  been  fubbed  off  from  this  day  to  that 
until  those  of  thy  complexion  have  become  in- 
finities upon  her  score. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Did  I  ever  call  for  thee  to 
pay? 

CHETTLE:     No,  I'll  give  thee  thy  due  there. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Then  peace,  woolsack,  and 
listen  to  the  poets. 

CHETTLE:  Aye,  marry,  I  will.  I  must 
make  some  show  of  penance,  while  I  have  the 
119 


MARY!  MARY! 

strength  left.  It  may  be  too  late  when  thou 
hast  — 

SHAKESPEARE:     A  truce,  Hal. 

JONSON:     And  listen  to  Drayton. 

CHETTLE:  Aye,  St.  Michael.  [To  dray- 
ton.]     We  wait  on  you,  sir. 

DRAYTON :     Am  I  the  first  ? 

JONSON :     Always. 

DRAYTON  [coming  forward  to  a  place  before 
CHETTLe's  table]  :     As  you  will.      [He  reads.'] 

How  many  paltry,  foolish,  painted  things, 
That  now  in  coaches  trouble  every  street, 
Shall  be  forgotten,  whom  no  poet  sings, 
Ere  they  be  well  wrapped  in  their  winding-sheet; 
Where  I  to  thee  eternity  shall  give. 
When  nothing  else  remaineth  of  these  days, 
And  queens  hereafter  shall  be  glad  to  live 
Upon  the  alms  of  my  superfluous  praise; 
Virgins  and  matrons  reading  these  my  rhymes, 
Shall  be  so  much  delighted  with  thy  story, 
That  they  shall  grieve  they  lived  not  in  these  times, 
To  have  seen  thee,  their  sex's  only  glory ; 
So  shalt  thou  fly  above  the  vulgar  throng. 
Still  to  survive  in  my  immortal  song. 

[General   applause,    cries    of   bravo,    etc. 
DRAYTON  bows  and  goes  back  to  his  seat.] 
CHETTLE  [to  SHAKESPEARE]  :     By  the  Lord, 
'tis  himself  he  praises,  not  the  lady. 
RALEIGH :     'Tis  the  way  with  poets. 
1 20 


MARY!  MARY  I 

JONSON :     With  all  men,  sir. 

HERBERT:     Certainly  with  those  at  court. 

SHAKESPEARE:  And  why  not?  Helen  her- 
self was  inarticulate;  she  shares  blind  Homer's 
immortality  as  in  a  portrait  the  sitter  wears  a 
ring  and  both  are  painted  on  the  canvas. 
When  the  ring  is  lost,  the  sitter  dust,  the  por- 
trait still  remains  to  tell  of  both  of  them;  and 
so  a  song  endures  singing  forever  of  Phyllida 
and  Corydon  who  wooed  her  with  his  melodies. 
And  yet  I  sometimes  think  that  you  and  I  will 
be  forgotten  with  all  the  other  singers  who  are 
mute  in  hushed  oblivion.  What  profit  to  say 
your  love  was  fair?  Was  ever  love  other  than 
fair?  What  can  you  add  to  Marlowe's  verse? 
Better,  methinks,  to  say  She  was  not  lovelier 
than  Helen;  no  armies  fought  long  battles  for 
her  sake,  and  yet  I  who  knew  her  well  loved 
her  —  she  was  not  fair  but  amoureuse. 

MARY  [to  her  brother]  :  Is  he  not  '  am- 
oureux?  ' 

EDWARD:  To  me,  words;  what  of  it?  He 
is  a  word-monger. 

MARY:     A  lord  of  language. 

RALEIGH:     Shall  we  hear  Lyly? 

CHETTLE:  Aye,  marry.  You,  John,  come 
forth. 

LYLY  [reciting  his  verses  as  he  comes  for- 
ward from  his  seat]  : 

121 


MARY!  MARY! 

Cupid  and  my  Campaspe  played 

At  cards  for  kisses:     Cupid  paid. 

He  stakes  his  quiver,  bows  and  arrows, 

His  mother's  doves  and  team  of  sparrows; 

Loses  them  too;  then  down  he  throws 

The  coral  of  his  lips,  the  rose 

Growing  on's  cheek,  but  none  knows  how; 

With  these  the  crystal  of  his  brow, 

And  then  the  dimple  of  his  chin  — 

All  these  did  my  Campaspe  win. 

And  last  he  set  her  both  his  eyes. — 

She  won  and  blind  did  Cupid  rise. — 

O  Love,  has  she  done  this  to  thee? 

What  shall,  alas,  become  of  me? 

[General  applause;  lyly  bows  low  and  re- 
tires to  his  seat.'] 

CHETTLE  [^o  FLETCHER]:     And  you,  Jack? 

FLETCHER:  Could  not  love  one  who  so 
maltreats  the  god  of  love. 

CHETTLE:     How  now,  lad? 

FLETCHER:  Talk  not  to  me  of  mistresses; 
her  tongue  was  ever  telling  He  after  lie.  Never 
again  shall  love,  deluding  love,  find  dwelling  in 
my  heart.  That  place  that  does  contain  my 
books,  the  best  companions,  is  to  me  a  glorious 
court,  where  hourly  I  may  converse  with  the 
old  sages  and  philosophers.  There  let  me 
rest.  Why  I  could  sleep  while  all  the  maids 
in  London  cried:     '  For  pity,  stay  with  us  and 

122 


IVIARY!  MARY! 

dally  in  the  shade.  See,  lusty  Spring  is  here, 
yellow  and  gaudy  blue,  daintily  blushing,  en- 
ticing men  to  joy  in  amourous  sport  and 
play  about  the  meade.'  Away  with  such  de- 
lights ! 

CHETTLE:  By  the  Lord,  thou  sayest  true, 
lad;  but  was  not  Joan  in  Sussex  a  most  sweet 
wench? 

FLETCHER:  What  a  pox  have  I  to  do  with 
Joan  in  Sussex?  See  here,  last  night  I  wrote 
in  praise  of  melancholy. 

CHETTLE:  Sweet  wag,  and  not  yet  a  hair 
upon  thy  chin. 

FLETCHER:     I  have  a  beard  coming. 

CHETTLE:  With  the  new  year.  [To  the 
company  at  large'\  :  But  shall  he  read  his 
verses? 

CHORUS  OF  VOICES:  Aye,  marry,  let  him 
read  them. 

CHETTLE:  Like  a  lass  that  mimics  her  fa- 
ther's deep-voiced  chidings.  Come  then, 
prithee,  Jacques,  read.  I  am  in  a  mood  to  hear 
your  rhymes.  I  feel  myself  as  melancholy  as 
a  lover's  lute  or  the  drone  of  a  Lincolnshire 
bagpipe. 

FLETCHER  [reads]  : 

Hence,  all  you  vain  delights, 
As  short  as  are  the  nights 

123 


MARY!  MARY! 

Wherein  you  spend  your  folly; 

There's  naught  in  this  life  sweet, 

If  man  were  wise  to  see't, 
But  only  melancholy! 
Welcome,  folded  arms  and  fixed  eyes, 
A  sigh  that  piercing  mortifies, 
A  look  that's  fastened  to  the  ground, 
A  tongue  chained  up,  without  a  sound ! 
Fountain-heads  and  pathless  groves, 
Places  which  pale  passion  loves! 
Moonlight  walks,  when  all  the  fowls 
Are  warmly  housed,  save  bats  and  owls! 

A  midnight  bell,  a  parting  groan! 

These  are  the  sounds  we  feed  upon ; 
Then  stretch  our  bones  in  a  still  gloomy  valley ; 
Nothing's  so  dainty  sweet  as  lovely  melancholy. 

JONSON :  O  woe !  O  woe  is  me !  Keep 
time,  O  plashing  fountain,  with  my  tears;  lan- 
guish unsolaced  in  a  desert  Arcady;  grief  falls 
in  showers  about  my  ears  like  melting  snow 
upon  some  craggy  hill. 

MARY  [aside  to  her  brother^  :  I  find  his 
verses  very  pretty. 

HERBERT  {to  FLETCHER]:  ExquIsIte ;  my 
compliments,  sir. 

CHETTLE:  A  truce  to  weeping.  'TIs  no 
more  In  keeping  with  our  design  than  crepe  at 
a  butcher's.  Commend  the  lad;  he  hath  done 
nobly. 

124 


MARY!  MARY! 

CHORUS  OF  VOICES :  Nobly !  excellently  well, 
etc. 

SHAKESPEARE   [quoting  himself]  : 

And  so,  sigh  no  mo', 
But  be  you  blithe  and  bonny, 
Converting  all  your  sounds  of  woe 
Into  Hey  nonny,  nonnj-. 

CHETTLE:  Let  US  be  merry.  [To  the 
drawer-l     A  cup  of  sack,  boy. 

JONSON:     And  another. 

CHETTLE:  Who  now?  You,  Florio ;  come, 
a  truce  to  tears. 

FLORIO  [reads]  : 

My  love  in  her  attire  doth  show  her  wit, 

It  doth  so  well  become  her; 

For  every  season  she  hath  dressings  fit, 

For  winter,  spring,  and  summer. 

No  beauty  she  doth  miss 

When  all  her  robes  are  on ; 

But  Beauty's  self  she  is 

When  all  her  robes  are  gone. 

[General     applause.     Cries     of     "  Well 
said,"  etc.] 
JONSON:     And  hast  thou  seen  her  so,  John? 
Fie,  for  shame. 

SHAKESPEARE:     Nay,  but  are  there  any  here 
can  swear  he  speaks  the  truth? 
125 


MARY!  MARY! 

chettle:  Marry,  and  there  be  not,  'tis  a 
most  properly  villainous  company,  and  I'd  as 
leave  consort  with  babes  unwitting  of  the  world 
as  drink  with  e'er  a  one  of  you. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Prithee,  most  noble  Paris, 
upon  what  hill-top  has  she  appeared  to  you  for 
judgment  of  her  charms?  An'  you  judge  of  our 
verses  as  lightly  as  of  our  vices,  we  are  all  con- 
demned for  Puritans  and  had  as  leave  sing 
psalms  as  praise  of  Amorette. 

CHETTLE:  Then  read;  thou  art  not  above 
suspicion. 

SHAKESPEARE:     Was  Caesar's  wife? 

CHETTLE  [confidentially']  :  I  have  heard 
say  she  was  most  lewdly  given. 

jonson:  An'  you  heard  that,  'twas  not  of 
Calpurnia. 

CHETTLE:     Had  he  more  than  one  wife? 

JONSON:     Aye,  marry,  four. 

SHAKESPEARE:  And  as  many  loves  as  thou 
hast  fondly  dreamed  of  in  the  night. 

CHETTLE:  Then  was  he  indeed  favoured 
among  men.  A  plague  of  sighing  and  grief! 
I  have  pursued  women  since  my  birth,  and  been 
successful  not  above  a  score  of  times. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Why  hast  thou  never  mar- 
ried? 

CHETTLE:     What,  with  such  friends  as  I  am 
cursed  withal?     Then  had  you  been  the  spoil 
126 


MARY!  MARY! 

of  me.     No,  I  will  be  procurer  for  ne'er  a  man 
in  Christendom,  not  I.      Read  your  verses. 

SHAKESPEARE:  I  Cannot;  I  have  destroyed 
them. 

CHETTLE:  What?  Jest  not  with  me.  An' 
you  do  — 

SHAKESPEARE  [interriiptin^l  :  I  would  not 
jest,  Hal,  when  thou  art  serious. 

CHETTLE:     Then  prithee,  read. 

SHAKESPEARE:  How  Can  I  read?  These 
others  have  stolen  all  my  metaphors,  pillaged 
the  heavens  for  similes,  ransacked  the  earth  for 
secret  beauties  such  as  might  bear  comparison 
with  the  fair  ladies  of  their  love;  lured  fairy 
phrases  from  out  the  mass  of  commonplace  that 
litters  this  old  world,  and  made  the  oldest  fables 
point  a  new  moral,  all,  all,  in  service  of  Dan 
Cupid.  And  yet  you  bid  me  read.  My  verses 
could  be  at  best  but  a  poor  repetition  of  all  that 
they  have  said.  No  I'll  not  read.  My  mis- 
tress is  too  fair  for  plagiaristic  praise.  What 
others  say  of  Beatrice,  Heloise  and  Annabelle 
could  never  pass  for  laud  of  her. 

JONSON:  Then  you  will  not  read?  'Tis 
well.  We  have  others  of  your  rhymings  here. 
They  shall  be  entered  for  the  prize. 

SHAKESPEARE:     No,    I    pray    you.     I    will 
write  more.      [He  gets  up  and  goes  toward  a 
table  in  the  rear  of  the  room  near  the  door.'\ 
127 


MARY!  MARYl 

CHETTLE:  Marry  do;  and  It  be  not  better 
than  the  best  of  Ovid  — 

SHAKESPEARE  [interrupting^  :  Hast  read 
Ovid,  Hal?     O  learned  Judge  1 

CHETTLE:  Zounds;  an'  you  trifle  with 
me  — 

SHAKESPEARE  [again  interrupting^  :  O  up- 
right Judge ! 

JONSON:     Peace,  Will;  you  anger  him. 

SHAKESPEARE:     No  abuse,  Hal. 

CHETTLE :  What !  no  abuse  to  taunt  me  with 
catch  phrases  from  thy  most  vile  smelling  thea- 
tre? 

SHAKESPEARE:  Hal,  o'  my  honour,  no 
abuse. 

CHETTLE:  A  plague  on  all  plagiarists!  A 
man  that  would  parody  himself  — 

HERBERT:     I  prithee  peace. 

CHETTLE:  He  hath  not  so  much  grace  as 
would  serve  to  be  prologue  to  a  dish  of  tripe. 

SHAKESPEARE :     O  noble  Judge  ! 

JONSON:     Peace,  Will. 

[SHAKESPEARE  calls  for  pen  and  paper. 1 

CHETTLE:  There  lives  not  above  four  good 
men  unhanged  in  England,  God  help  the  while, 
[In  a  voice  of  thunder. 1  Boy,  bring  me  a  cup 
of  sack! 

SHAKESPEARE:     Not  angry,  Hal? 
128 


MARY!  MARY! 

CHETTLE:  That's  past  praying  for. 

JONSON:  Cease,    Will. 

CHETTLE:  Come,  Ben,  cheerily.  Let's 
have  it. 

[SHAKESPEARE  sets  to  writing.'] 

JONSON  [reading]  : 

Have  you  seen  but  a  bright  lily  grow 
Before  rude  hands  have  touched  it? 
Have  you  marked  but  the  fall  o'  the  snovir 
Before  the  soil  hath  smutched  it? 
Have  you  felt  the  wool  of  the  beaver, 

Or  the  swan's  down  ever? 
Or  have  smelt  o'  the  bud  o'  the  brier? 

Or  the  nard  in  the  fire? 
Or  have  tasted  the  bag  of  the  bee? 
O  so  white!     O  so  soft!     O  so  sweet  is  she. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Good,  Master  Ben;  it 
makes  music  on  which  a  myriad  loves  might 
feed. 

HERBERT:     O  rare  Ben  Jonson! 

CHETTLE :  By  the  Lord  I  had  not  done  bet- 
ter myself. 

CHORUS:     Honest  Ben!  well  said!  etc. 

MARY  [/o  her  brotherl :  'Twas  very  pretty, 
but  my  Sweet  William —  We  have  but  to 
wait. 

CHETTLE:     And  now,  Sir  Walter. 
129 


MARY!  MARY! 

RALEIGH:     'Tis  but  a  trifle. 

JONSON :  And  like  gold  outweighs  a  mass 
of  dross. 

RALEIGH :  My  love  admits  no  rival,  and  so 
perforce  I  have  no  love. 

HERBERT:     No  love,  sir? 

RALEIGH  :     At  present  none. 

MARY  [as  though  to  herself]  :  'Tis  past  be- 
lieving. 

RALEIGH  [continuing]  :  Save  her  most  gra- 
cious Majesty,  the  Queen. 

CHETTLE  [rising  and  proffering  a  toast]  : 
The  Queen! 

ALL  [rising  and  lifting  their  cups]  :  The 
Queen,  God  bless  her  I 

MARY  [as  the  company  resume  their  seats, 
aside  to  her  brother]  :  And  he  cares  no  more 
for  her  than  I  do. 

RALEIGH :  I  could  not  read  verses  in  praise 
of  her;  how  should  she  vie  here  with  these  oth- 
ers—  Diana  who  so  far  outshines  all  women 
yet  created. 

MARY  [the  cat,  to  her  brother]  :  And  she  Is 
as  ugly  as  the  witch  of  Endor. 

RALEIGH:  But  I  have  heard  your  other 
poets  sing,  and  so  — 

JONSON:  Let  us  hear  what  you  have  to 
say  to  them,  sir. 

RALEIGH  [reading]  : 

130 


MARY!  MARY! 

Shall  I  like  a  hermit  dwell, 
On  a  rock,  or  in  a  cell 
Calling  home  the  smallest  part 
That  is  missing  of  my  heart, 
To  bestow  it  where  I  may 
Meet  a  rival  every  day? 
If  she  undervalue  me. 
What  care  I  how  fair  she  be? 

MARY  [as  though  to  herself] :  If  he  under- 
value me,  what  care  I  how  rich  he  be? 

RALEIGH  [overhearing  her] :  Sir,  you 
spoke  ? 

MARY  [confused]  :  Your  pardon;  I  was  re- 
peating to  myself  a  snatch  of  song  heard  long 
ago.     Your  pardon. 

RALEIGH  [with  a  slight  bow  to  her  con- 
tinues'] : 

Were  her  hands  as  rich  a  prize 
As  her  hairs,  or  precious  eyes, 
If  she  lay  them  out  to  take 
Kisses,  for  good  manners'  sake ; 
And  let  every  lover  skip 
From  her  hand  unto  her  lip; 
If  she  seem  not  chaste  to  me. 
What  care  I  how  chaste  she  be. 

MARY  [aside  to  her  brother]  :  If  she  let 
him  know  of  the  others,  I  have  no  pity  for 
her. 


131 


MARY!  MARY! 


RALEIGH  : 


No,  she  must  be  perfect  snow, 
In  effect  as  well  as  show ; 
Warming,  but  as  snowballs  do, 
Not  like  fire,  by  burning  too; 
But  when  she  by  change  hath  got 
To  her  heart  a  second  lot, 
Then  if  others  share  with  me, 
Farewell  her,  whate'er  she  be ! 

CHETTLE :     Excellent. 

SHAKESPEARE:     Very  bravely  said. 

CHORUS:     So  say  I;     Bravo,  etc. 

CHETTLE:  I  could  bid  a  thousand  loves 
good-bye,  an'  I  thought  I  should  find  another 
on  the  morrow. 

SHAKESPEARE:  A  very  Solomon  for  wis- 
dom, and  for  women.  Fie,  Hal,  for  shame. 
You  are  like  a  candle  the  better  part  burnt  out. 

CHETTLE:  I  am  like  a  lamp  replenished 
with  oil.  Come,  boy,  a  cup  of  sack.  My  voice 
is  as  good  as  any  in  London. 

jonson:  And  yet  you  cannot  read  Mar- 
lowe. 

CHETTLE:  I  can  swear  an  oath  with  ere  a 
man  living;  an'  I  do  not,  I  am  a  shotten  her- 
ring. Loving  is  but  so  much  blasphemy,  vows 
plighted  and  broken  with  a  twist  of  the  tongue. 
Tell  me  not  of  love. 

132 


MARY!  MARY! 

SHAKESPEARE:  No  man  shall  so  presump- 
tuous be. 

CHETTLE:     Let  me  hear  your  verses. 

MARY:     Aye,  let  us  hear  Will  Shakespeare. 

SHAKESPEARE  [rising  and  bowing  to  mary]  : 
Your  servant,  gentle  stranger. 

CHETTLE:  A  truce  for  your  fine  manners; 
they  are  not  In  keeping  with  your  plays. 

SHAKESPEARE:       How  SO  ? 

CHETTLE:  For  you  have  peopled  the  stage 
with  the  greatest  number  of  rogues  and  villains, 
cutthroats  and  thiefs,  harlots,  drunkards  and 
cowards  in  history.  Are  these  fine  man- 
ners? 

SHAKESPEARE:     Areyours? 

CHETTLE:  And  they  be  not,  he  was  a  fool 
that  taught  them  to  me. 

SHAKESPEARE  \^com'ing  forward]  :  Speak 
not  ill  of  the  dead. 

CHETTLE:  There  are  as  many  blackguards 
dead  as  living. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Let  them  rest  in  peace.  If 
their  judges  here  were  all  as  virtuous  as  thou 
art,  it  went  hard  with  them  in  life:  they  have 
suffered  enough. 

CHETTLE:  Thou  hast  a  most  damnable  wit, 
and  could  indeed  corrupt  a  saint.  Thou  hast 
done  me  much  harm,  Will,  God  forgive  thee  for 
it. 

133 


MARY!  MARY! 

SHAKESPEARE:  And  thou  wast  not  damned 
ere  I  met  thee,  'twas  through  some  oversight. 

CHETTLE:  I  knew  nothing;  and  now,  if  a 
man  speaks  truly,  am  I  little  better  than  one  of 
the  wicked.     I  must  give  over  this  life. 

SHAKESPEARE :  'Tis  near  thy  time.  There 
is  not  a  white  hair  on  thy  face  but  should  have 
its  effect  upon  thy  character. 

CHETTLE:  And,  by  the  Lord,  I  will  give  It 
over. 

SHAKESPEARE:      Do. 

CHETTLE :  I  would  I  were  a  weaver ;  I  could 
sing  hymns  or  anything. 

SHAKESPEARE:  I  see  a  good  amendment  of 
life  in  thee,  Hal. 

CHETTLE :  I  would  to  God  I  knew  where  a 
commodity  of  good  names  were  to  be  bought. 

SHAKESPEARE:  What  hast  thou  to  offer  in 
exchange  ? 

CHETTLE:  An'  I  do  not  get  one,  thou  hast 
been  there  before  me  and  stolen  the  lot.  But, 
prithee,  read:  I  would  steep  myself  in  fantasy. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Hast  thou  no  music  In  thy 
soul? 

CHETTLE:  Marry,  thou  knowest;  yet  It 
grows  stale  with  repetition.  Refresh  me  with 
thy  wood  notes  wild. 

SHAKESPEARE:     What  wouldst  thou,  Hal? 

CHETTLE :  Marry,  nothing.  I  like  thy  fan- 
134 


MARY!  MARY! 

cles;  they  ascend  me  into  the  brain,  drive  out  all 
the  foolish  and  dull  vapours  which  environ  it, 
and  fill  my  heart  with  nimble  and  delectable 
shapes.     Woo  me  with  thy  verses. 

MARY  [to  her  brother']  :  Oh  listen.  I  could 
almost  swoon  to  the  delicious  music  of  his  voice. 

EDWARD  [to  MARY;  he  begins  to  weary  of  all 
poetry  and  of  all  lovers]  :  Will  you  too  grow 
lyrical? 

SHAKESPEARE  [to  chettle]  :  Art  listening, 
Hal? 

chettle:     As  intent  as  a  cat  at  a  rat  hole. 

MARY  [to  EDWARD]:  Hush !  When  he 
speaks  my  praise,  I  am  in  love  —  [She  does 
not  finish  her  sentence.] 

SHAKESPEARE  [reading"]  : 

My  mistress'  eyes  are  nothing  like  the  sun, — 

CHETTLE  [interrupting]:     How  so? 
SHAKESPEARE    [to    chettle]  :     They    are 
black.      [He  resumes  his  reading.] 

Coral  is  far  more  red  than  her  lips  red ; 

If  snow  be  white,  why  then  her  breasts  are  dun ; 

If  hairs  be  wires,  black  wires  grow  on  her  head. 

MARY  [it  is  scarce  the  sort  of  sonnet  she  had 
expected  from  her  lover  to  herself]  :  Can  it 
be  that  I  hear  aright? 

135 


MARY!  MARY! 

SHAKESPEARE  [reading]  : 

I  have  seen  roses  damask'd,  red  and  white, 
But  no  such  roses  see  I  in  her  cheeks ;  — 

MARY  {bitterly  disappointed,  to  herself] : 
For  shame,  so  to  abuse  me. 

SHAKESPEARE  [reading;  he  little  guesses  the 
effect  of  his  verses  on  the  lady  to  whom  they  are 
indirectly  addressed]  : 

And  in  some  perfumes  is  there  more  delight 
Than  in  the  breath  that  from  my  mistress  reeks. 

MARY  [she  is  Still  young;  never  before  has 
she  been  so  hurt;  as  though  to  herself]  :  So 
to  abuse  me  before  the  world. 

SHAKESPEARE  \_as  above  —  for  love  is  blind, 
and,  it  may  be,  the  least  bit  deaf]  : 

I  love  to  hear  her  speak,  yet  well  I  know 
That  music  hath  a  far  more  pleasing  sound. 

MARY  [to  herself;  sick  at  heart]  :  Unkind, 
and  I  believed  in  your  love. 

SHAKESPEARE  [as  above,  unconscious  of  the 
pain  he  is  causing]  : 

I  grant  I  never  saw  a  goddess  go ; 

My  mistress,  when  she  walks,  treads  on  the  ground. 

MARY    [unable   longer   to   control  her  rage, 
and  disappointment]  :     Call  you  such  slander 
136 


MARY!  MARY! 

praise?  Fie!  For  shame  so  to  mock  your 
lady  here  in  the  presence  of  your  friends. 

CHETTLE:  What's  this?  [Mary  has  been 
nursing  her  wrath  unobserved,  all  eyes  being 
centred  on  Shakespeare. '\ 

SEVERAL  [together'\ :  Silence.  Peace.  Let 
Will  Shakespeare  — 

SHAKESPEARE  [apparently  unaffected  by  the 
interruption]  : 

And  yet,  by  Heaven,  I  think  my  love  as  rare 
As  any  she  belied  with  false  compare. 

MARY:  Out  upon  you!  A  late  atonement 
for  such  abuse. 

SHAKESPEARE:  On  my  honour,  no  abuse, 
and  no  atonement.  My  sonnet  stands  as  it  is 
written.  'Tis  simple  truth.  'My  mistress' 
eyes  are  nothing  like  the  sun.' 

MARY  [scornfully]  :  Will  your  lady  think 
as  you  do  ? 

SHAKESPEARE:  Perhaps;  perhaps  she  will 
be  angry  as  you  are  angry;  perhaps  she  will  un- 
derstand. 

MARY:  Were  they  not  all  cowards  here 
some  champion  of  your  mistress  would  spring 
forward  to  defend  her  good  name. 

SHAKESPEARE:  Her  good  name  has  not 
been  questioned. 

HERBERT  [to  mary]  :  And  why  should  she 
137 


MARY!  MARY! 

need    another    champion?     You    are    valiant 
enough  in  all  conscience,  sir. 

MARY:     I  win  not  hear  the  sex  from  which 
my  mother  stems  — 

SHAKESPEARE  [interrupting'}  :     Is  not  every 
word  I  have  said  true? 

MARY:     True    or    false,    you    shall    defend 
them. 

[She  darts  from  her  place  behind  the 
table,  drawing  her  sword  and  making  at 
SHAKESPEARE  who  Stands  his  ground.  HER- 
BERT interposes  himself  between  them.} 
MARY  [to  HERBERT]  :  Out  of  my  way.  I 
will  slit  his  throat  for  him,  libellous  poetaster. 

HERBERT  [seizing  her  in  his  arms]  :     Who 
Is  abusive  now? 

MARY  [to  SHAKESPEARE,  Stamping  her  foot 
in  vexation]  :     I  hate  you ! 

SHAKESPEARE     [affecting     surprise] :     And 
why  pray? 

MARY  [almost  in  tears,  helpless  in  HERBERT'S 
arms,  removes  her  hat  and  hurls  it  in  Shake- 
speare's face] :  I  hate  you.  [Her  heavy 
raven-black  hair  comes  loose  and  falls  in  a  huge, 
glistening,  moulten  mass  about  her  shoulders.] 
SHAKESPEARE  [in  amazement,  falling  back 
against   chettle's   table]:     Mary!    Mary! 

HERBERT:     By  Heavens  1     A  woman.      [He 
holds  her  even  closer.] 

138 


MARY!  MARY! 

MARY  [to  SHAKESPEARE]  :  You  think  you 
know  me  well  enough  to  body  forth  in  verses, 
yet  fail  to  recognise  me  though  we  sit  above  two 
hours  together  in  the  same  room.  You  love  to 
hear  your  mistress  speak?  Well,  you  shall 
hear  her  now. 

CHETTLE  [a  good  judge  of  wine']  :  A  fiery 
minx,  by  all  that's  holy. 

FLETCHER  [disgusted  with  the  whole  sex]  : 
A  woman,  so  to  disguise  herself  and  spy  upon  a 
man. 

HERBERT  [as  though  to  himself]  :  Mistress 
Fitton. 

MARY  [bursting  into  tears,  and  stamping  her 
foot  in  baffled  rage]:  I  hate  you!  I  hate 
you! 

HERBERT:  Mary!  Mary!  Fie,  for  shame. 
[He  puts  his  arm  more  gently  about  her;  sob- 
bing, she  hides  her  face  upon  his  shoulder.] 

JONSON  [married,  and,  as  he  himself  tells 
us,  to  a  shrew]  :  Sic  transit  gloria  amoris,  my 
friends. 

FLETCHER  [very  young  and  knowing]  : 
Talk  not  to  me  of  mistresses  1 

SHAKESPEARE  [to  chettle]  :  O'my  hon- 
our, Hal,  I  meant  no  abuse. 

CHETTLE:  Abuse,  sayest  thou?  'Twas  a 
sonnet  as  lightly  caressing  as  the  chill  of  De- 
cember. 

139 


MARY!  MARY! 

MARY  [to  HERBERT] :  Take  me  away. 
Please,  please,  take  my  away. 

HERBERT  \_courteously'\  :  Where  you  will. 
[^He  leads  her  towards  the  door.'] 

CHETTLE  [gruffly;  anxious  to  clear  the  room; 
SHAKESPEARE  must  be  alone  with  his  grief]  : 
'Tis  late,  lads. 

RALEIGH:     I  must  to  court. 

[He  follows  MARY  and  HERBERT  out  onto 
the  street.  The  company  breaks  up.  As  the 
door  closes  behind  the  last  of  them,  leaving 
CHETTLE  and  SHAKESPEARE  alone  in  the  tap- 
room, FRANCIS  enters  with  a  cup  of  ale;  see- 
ing the  place  almost  deserted,  he  drinks  it  off 
himself.] 

SHAKESPEARE  [to  CHETTLE,  wearily] :  I 
wooed  the  crowds  with  my  lyrics  and  they  gave 
me  leave  to  strut  an  hour  upon  the  boards; 
I  wooed  a  woman  and  she  leaves  me  for  an- 
other. 

CHETTLE  [fat  and  optimistic]  :  Perchance 
the  labours  of  thy  love  are  not  in  vain;  all  things 
are  born  in  travail,  man  or  beast,  and  it  may  be 
that  you  will  yet  give  forth  some  poem  to  im- 
mortalise this  same  Mistress  Fitton.  Men 
shall  see  her  shadow  cross  the  stage  and  wonder 
what  she  was,  or  fair  or  false.  Born  of  a 
dream,  they'll  say,  who  was  this  Rosalind  the 
140 


MARY!  MARY! 

poet   wooed   with  verses   hung   all   about   the 
libraries  of  the  world? 

SHAKESPEARE:  Hal,  you  speak  truth. 
And  yet  I  would  that  I  could  leave  this  sorry 
town;  hie  me  away  to  Arden,  and  lie,  a  fool  in 
the  forest,  to  bask  me  in  the  sun.  Oh !  1 
could  rail  on  Lady  Fortune,  sans  intermission, 
an  hour  by  the  dial. 

CHETTLE:  A  fig  for  your  raillery!  I 
would  I  were  a  priest  that  I  might  quench  my 
thirst  and  impose  penance  on  such  young 
wenches  as  rob  a  poet  of  his  wits. 

SHAKESPEARE:  And  SO  you  recall  me  to 
mine?  [To  the  drawer^  Francis,  two  pints 
of  Bastard.  [Turning  again  to  chettle.] 
And,  Hal,  thou  shalt  be  a  priest.  I  will  con- 
struct a  comedy  and  in  it  thou  shalt  play  the  part 
of  a  fat  friar,  grown  so  far  in  liking  with  thy 
folly  that  thou  knowest  not  how  wise  in  truth 
thou  art;  for  thou  art  wise  and  witty,  the  butt 
of  many  a  jest,  the  occasion  of  many  a  quip,  but 
human,  Hal  — [breaking  off]  May  thy  sins  be 
upon  the  heads  of  thy  traducers  !  Mayest  thou 
live  long  and  merrily,  and  be  rewarded  in  this 
world  for  the  good  cheer  thou  hast  brought  to 
one,  the  least  of  thy  admirers. 

CHETTLE:  Not  the  least,  Will,  the  least  un- 
derstood. 

141 


MARY!  MARY! 

SHAKESPEARE:     So  be  it.     A  song,  Hal,  a 
song. 

The  curtain  descends  as  chettle  strikes 
up: 

"  When  good  King  Arthur  ruled  this 
land." 


142 


L'ENVOI 

How  shall  I  praise  my  love  when  every  phrase 

cries  out; 
*  Lo !     I  am  barren,   friend,  squeezed  dry  by 

hands   that   flout 
Your  efforts  from  the  grave  ?  ' 
Never  in  words  that  wave  like  banners  in  the 

sky 
Shall  I  proclaim  my  love  to  every  passerby, 

To  prince  and  priest  and  knave: 
Here,  here  dwells  Beauty's  self!  —  And  yet  I 

know  that  she 
Plays  truant  from  the  dreams  that  haunted  Ar- 

cady. 

Because  old  Homer  sang,  because  his  lids  grew 

wet 
With   musing  on   her   face,   Greece   boasts   of 
Helen  yet; 
And  Cleopatra's  smile, 
Bathed  in  the  tears  of  kings,  the  tears  of  half  of 

Rome 
Mourning  great  Antony,  lies  mirrored  in  the 
foam 
Of  her  old  father  Nile. 
143 


MARY!  MARY! 

Why  should  my  muse  be  mute?  no  words  rush 

out  to  swear 
Allegiance  to  my  love?     Is  she  not  all  as  fair 

As  those  young  Villon  sang?  as  Blanche  the  hly- 

white? 
Joan  of  Rouen  Town?  Dian  the  kings'  delight? 

I  look  upon  her  face, 
And  tongue-tied  turn  away;  I  read  in  every  line 
How  the  master  hand  of  God  refineth  things  so 

fine; 
Hers  seems  the  perfect  grace, 
And  yet  I  know  that  He  each  day  leans  from 

above 
To  trace  new  glories  there. —  How  can  I  praise 

my  love? 


144 


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